In a mail to the FreeBSD hackers mailing-list, a very detailed request is made from Christian Zander at Nvidia, concerning several missing features in the FreeBSD kernel. In order for Nvidia to provide improved OpenGL performance and SLI support in the future for FreeBSD/i386 and FreeBSD/amd64, several important tasks needs to be completed.
I don’t use FreeBSD and I don’t even own an Nvidia graphics card, but I commend Nvidia for this. This is a wonderful step in the right direction.
I wish ATI would do half this for BSD and Linux. Then we’d really be in business.
For some reason I tricked myself into buying another ATI graphics card last Christmas, but unless some changes are made, and some initiative is shown on ATI’s part, I’m going with Nvidia for my next purchase.
I use FreeBSD on a Dell laptop with Nvidia graphics and I’m thankful for the support from Nvidia. I don’t care if the driver is closed or open, as long as I can get good performance from it.
Knowing they actively keep track of FreeBSD is good news for us users because it means we’ll don’t have to worry about lacking graphic performance compared to GNU/Linux distros.
And that is why I plan to stick to Nvidia graphic cards, maybe even after ATI or VIA provides the same support with even better cards, just because they supported OSS from the (near) beginning.
*edit* taipo
Edited 2006-06-30 21:31
I don’t care if the driver is closed or open, as long as I can get good performance from it.
…You’ll feel that way until you get burned badly. I completely quit on proprietary software for anything I actually want working. My change of heart came when the NVidia driver had a long running bug on my graphics card, causing X to randomly hard lock.
Detailed bug reports were made a number of times, but the bug wasn’t fixed for at least 6 months, which was few months after I gave up on NVidia and bought an ATI 9200, specifically because it had working open source drivers.
If the driver was open source, I would have been able to fix the driver myself, and/or gotten help with it from the Xorg people, and it certainly wouldn’t have forced me to buy a new graphics card to replace a perfectly good piece of hardware.
As a result, for anything that needs to be reliable and dependable, I now refuse to use closed source code unless I _really_ have no choice (an example of this would be CAD programs, sadly).
I’ve been following the NVIDIA FreeBSD forum for a while now, and must say, AMD64 support has been a long time coming. I’m really grateful to Zander (who’s been a wealth of knowledge on the forum) for showing some initiative in coordinating with the FreeBSD people (well, we’ve been told that they’ve been cooperating, but there really hasn’t been any public display). At the very least, this should bring the discussion more into the public eye, and hopefully bring about the eventual release of an AMD64 driver. I’m sure there are some very talented people already working on this, but getting status updates is like pulling teeth.
It’s nice to see a corporation that cares about Open Source. This is the reason I always go with Nvidia for both linux and FreeBSD. I don’t expect all of these features to be implemented until 7.0. That’ll give the developers time to do it. But I’m glad Nvidia cares about improving the quality of the drivers.
I don’t really expect most of these features to be implemented until a cosiderable time after 7.0. 7.0 is already pretty heavy in development, and these look like some pretty hefty changes. Assuming that this is the first the FreeBSD developers have heard of these requests, and work is not already in progress, then these changes I think are a ways off. That’s also assuming that FreeBSD even decides to implement all of these. I think a couple of these are already being worked on (for instance John Baldwin’s work) and hopefully these will make it into 7.0, but 7.0 really isn’t that far off.
NVIDIA at least is very supportive about Open Source projects not like ATI that does not care for other OS but for Windoze. I think it is a step to the right direction since a collaborative job between them will lead to a better NVIDIA and freeBSD future. I have used freeBSD for some time and NVIDIA isn’t as good quality as in Linux for the freeBSD. But I give kudos to the NVIDIA people always heading towards the right cause.
Note: I use WIndoze term not for trolling just because I don’t like to use the true name which implies using a ™ after it
.
You’re posting on a forum. You’re not going to get sued if you don’t put a ™ after the word Windows. If you really feel this strongly about it, then perhaps you should find a nickname for Linux(tm) as well.
You’re quite right – on the platforms that nVidia do support – the support, related to thair closed drivers, are really good.
But apart from that – they’re closed. If you prefer open source drivers or if you use another platform – you’re on your own. No specs (not even recent 2D specs – even under NDA), no nothing.
But apart from that – they’re closed. If you prefer open source drivers or if you use another platform – you’re on your own. No specs (not even recent 2D specs – even under NDA), no nothing.
That’s different from ATi how? Seriously, nVidia and ATi are the only two serious options for high-performance, high-quality 3D acceleration. While I wholeheartedly wish that they would provide this information. Faulting nVidia for something that is industry standard practice is getting old.
This isn’t just a problem with the graphics card industry either. It’s a problem with the hardware manufacturing industry as a whole.
ATi has opened up their 2D acceleration spec…so as long as you don’t need any 3D features, you can use Xorg’s default ati driver and that’ll be fine.
On the other hand, Nvidia does not release any spec about their hardware, so you have to install their proprietary drivers before even using 2D acceleration.
ATi has opened up their 2D acceleration spec…so as long as you don’t need any 3D features, you can use Xorg’s default ati driver and that’ll be fine.
On the other hand, Nvidia does not release any spec about their hardware, so you have to install their proprietary drivers before even using 2D acceleration.
What’s that old saying about a half-truth still being a whole lie?
ATi handing out half the specs is a half hearted attempt to appease consumers. I’ll be impressed when they give both specs instead of half of them.
They’re just as bad as nVidia as far as I’m concerned. Actually, I’d say they are worse. At least nVidia actively supports Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris! That’s more than ATi can say, which currently has half-hearted Linux support and Windows only.
Besides, you didn’t tell the whole story. While nVidia doesn’t necessarily publish full 2D specifications, they DO provide open source 2D driver code to the XFree86 & X.org projects, see the note here at the bottom:
http://ftp.x.org/pub/X11R7.0/doc/html/nv.4.html
Personally, I think a working driver is more useful in some cases.
Edited 2006-07-01 10:47
The binary driver of nVidia is buggy and very unstable on FreeBSD (Linux?); the binary is supported only on a specified version of the kernel (e.g., tnt2 cards work only with FreeBSD 5.3).
The problem is that if we have the source code of the driver, we can unlock the full potential of the hardware and enhance performance installing a (good) firmware.
From Emiel on DragonFly mailing list:
I already wrote several times to nVidia that I’d accept to sign an NDA to get access to the driver source, but I haven’t heard back from them yet. I’m seriously considering starting a petition to get dfbsd support, but I don’t know if it will have any clout, since we’re not “big” like FreeBSD yet.
Btw, Intel cards have a decent accelerated open source dirver.
The binary driver of nVidia is buggy and very unstable on FreeBSD (Linux?); the binary is supported only on a specified version of the kernel (e.g., tnt2 cards work only with FreeBSD 5.3).
Did you read the request linked in the news item? If you did, you’d realize that part of the “bugginess” of the nVidia driver under FreeBSD is because of the lack of support for proper memory allocation mechanisms that FreeBSD provides. The request from nVidia to supply extra functionality in the FreeBSD kernel will allow an increase in stability and performance!
Also, I question whether someone will be able to “unlock the full potential” of hardware just because they have driver source. It makes no sense to me that people outside of a company that don’t even know a tenth of the hardware or the design of a product would be able to do so much better than those inside that company. Writing 3D/2D drivers is no longer a trivial exercise. It’s extremely difficult, requires years of experience, and a great deal of intimate knowledge of hardware and software.
I realise that ATI open-sourced their 9200 driver model, but i am a gamer which makes it a worthless gesture, to me anyway.
I’m not a gamer, so I don’t care that much about having the latest graphics card, so today 2xx-based ATI cards allows me to have a system running 100% open source drivers, including 3D, no matter how slow they’re are. Aditionally, the availability of 2xx-based open source drivers has allowed X.org to experiment with things like composite, xgl and friends. Even if ATI doesn’t release specs anymore, they did in the past and it’s not fair to pretend that they didn’t.
It’s a shame that ATI went back to behave like nvidia and they don’t release specs anymore. These days, the one guys who seem to care about opensource drivers are the intel guys. They’ve hired Keith Packard, Eric Anholt, kernel guys like Arjan van de Ven and lots of other people. They also release drivers for the wireless devices in the centrino platform, drivers for their network cards, specs for their SATA chipsets, etc. They seem to care more about open source that both ATI and Nvidia. I’m not buying an ATI/Nvidia again, specially now that Nvidia and ATI also make motherboard chipsets that forces me to have aditional closed drivers for the nvidia network card and such. If Intel keeps releasing opensource drivers, I’m definetively not buying another brand.
I am not aware of any opensource drivers that Intel has released for their wireless chipsets. IIRC, the centrino drivers had to be reverse engineered, and Intel still doesn’t allow the firmwares to be distributed.
If interested try and read up on the Open Graphics option.
“Availability of a graphics card with fully published specs and open source drivers”
http://wiki.duskglow.com/tiki-index.php?page=AboutOpenGraphics&PHPS…