On 06/15/15 17:19, Riccardo Mottola wrote:
Hi,
for the same laptop for which I just posted a full dmesg about the
battery problem, which reports this video card:
vga1 at pci1 dev 0 function 0 "NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS" rev 0xa1
I get a super-slow X11. Dragging an xterm may take half a second, up to
the point where X11 looses track of the mouse move events. Scrolling
XTerm is unusably slwo too.
Using a larger editor like Emacs or Firefox... even worse. It looks
totally unacelercated.
[snip]
Sadly, Nvidia video cards are to be avoided. I think it would be fair to
say that Nvidia is the most open-source hostile company out there.
Because of this there is no Nvidia specific driver in OpenBSD. You are
using it in vga compatible mode. Things work, but hardly with the
speed that it delivers on Windows.
There is a reverse engineered driver called nouveau. Look at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouveau_(software) for more info.
While theoretically portable to OpenBSD, it involves work, and when
I looked at it a bit it was under constant change, such that a port
dated Monday might be outdated by Saturday. I have a LOT of respect
for the people doing this. It's hard. I did a little hardware poking
on the 286, a long time ago. It's isn't simple. I also hope it was
written under a reasonable license.
Once nouveau stabilizes (I have no idea of its current state), someone
may get the interest to port it. Maybe. But as of right now, it ought
to be avoided.
--STeve Andre'
