Hello,
I've got a mixed feeling towards the binary driver for NVidia boards :
- there an "emotional" and "political" aspect to the issue, which is to have all of
FreeBSD
available as source, with the Berkeley Licence. This has allowed the project to change
the driver infrastucture, for example (passage to CAM for SCSI, or the recent
transition
to newbus) without asking permission to people outside the project. With this viewpoint
it is not acceptable to use a binary-only driver for the NVidia boards (anyway, the
competition
is such in the graphics board market that 3dfx or ATI **could** have trouble inspecting
the NVidia sources fast enough to incorporate the new ideas)
- there is another "industrial" aspect : the exact same "feature" of the FreeBSD
project,
which is the total control of the interfaces between the kernel, the drivers and
userland
is damaging in the sense that it seems difficult to expect form third-parties to write
drivers for FreeBSD if the interfaces change too often (is there any kld which is not
part of the standard FreeBSD releases ? - is there any manufacturer which delivers
binary-only drivers to its boards ?) - the stabilization (if at all possible) of the
driver-kernel interface and the accompanying delivery of shrink-wrapped drivers
would be a great plus to the credibility of FreeBSD
Just my 0.2 Euro ....
TfH
Coleman Kane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on 26/07/2000 00:23:33
To: Mike Muir <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
cc: Coleman Kane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
[EMAIL PROTECTED](bcc: Thierry
HERBELOT/FR/ALCATEL)
Subject: Re: agp and 3dfx
The 3dfx cards do work under FreeBSD, just not using glide. XFree86 4+
uses DRI to accomplish its 3D acceleration. If you want to use glide
games through linux emulation, you can either run them as root (not
acceptable many times, at least for me :), or you will be able to use
them with this driver once it gets the last bugs worked out. It works
fine for Voodoo1's and 2's, just have some trouble with the resource
setup on the Voodoo 3's.
As far as the NVidia binary drivers go, I don't think they are planning any
releases for FreeBSD. Personally, I don't want to endorse this sort of behavior
from manufacturers like NVidia giving out binary-only drivers. I don't buy their
cards because of that, and also because I can't afford them. There is a small
amount of total IP that can be gotten from reading source code, and it is too
small for a company to bother trying to parse through to understand. They'd wate
too much time trying to figure it out, that it wouldn't matter once they were
done. Anyway, I don't want to go out on a rant about lame business practices,
the basic idea here is no, NVidia doesn't provide binary only drivers for
FreeBSD, and we don't really care for the idea of closed source drivers. Closed
source drivers just make it a pain for everyone to get work done from
installation to associated programming (say, extensions to the drivers). I'm not
gonna go into a holy war here or reveal what I think they are closing them for,
but basically, they are not expected to come ever. You can simply use the
included on in XFree86 4.0.1, which I think supposrts DRI.
[SNIP]
--
Coleman Kane
President,
UC Free O.S. Users Group - http://pohl.ececs.uc.edu
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