On Monday 17 Sep 2001 9:16 pm, you wrote:
> There's no good reason why you couldn't put an NVIDIA card in a sever
> and use the open source 2D driver. You wouldn't want to enable DRI on
> you server, either, because of lockup issues.
Look at it this way: a couple of security holes have been found in the DRI
drivers, and fixed. What's in the nVidia drivers?
> You may feel that the NVIDIA driver sets a bad precedent, but it also
> sets a high standard. Their drivers are high performance, complete, and
> stable. They have several people with histories in open source 3D
I've never used them, but a lot of people have told me they can't get them to
run stable.
> efforts, people who care about 3D on Linux. You trusted these people
> with your drivers when they worked on Utah and DRI, why shouldn't you
> trust them when they work for NVIDIA?
Because I can't see the source. No, I don't read the source of every program
I install, but I do read a lot of source code. Why do I trust myself more
than the people who wrote the driver? I don't, but that doesn't mean I, or
some other person wround the world looking at the code will not see something
the authors didn't.
> If binary-only is the only way to generate enough revenue to support 3D
> driver development for Linux, it should at least be considered.
People are willing to use them, so fair enough. But whilst I have a
reasonable choice I will use an open source driver.
> The important thing is to have drivers available from a source you have
> some confidence in. If Linus wrote a binary-only kernel module that
> provided some functionality you require, would you have faith in it?
Not particularly, and that's the point. I don't think Linus would have that
much confidence in the driver either (hubris aside).
> No, it's not that simple. How long have the G400 specs been available?
> I still have lockups and general flakeyness with DRI/G400. Stable
> drivers don't just magically appear when specs arrive. You need talent,
> and you need time. Even with the amount of talent working full time on
> the DRI project, things have been moving slowly. It's a big, difficult
> job that needs a lot of attention to do correctly.
>
> All the open source cheerleading the in world isn't going to make
> drivers appear from thin air.
Seriously, if I had a G400, I would help fixing bugs in it. Unfortunately I'm
a poor student so I have a crappy old 3dfx Banshee[1] card. So unless I win
the lottery there is not much chance of me personally writing/fixing any DRI
code in the near future.
[1] Only has one bug that I have run into, which is so esoteric it's hardly
worth fixing.
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