Alan Coopersmith wrote: > Ken Mays wrote: >> The latest driver from Nvidia adds all of the latest support for the newer >> graphic cards and better LCD restore support as well on notebooks. > > And it removes support for older graphics cards, forcing us to > have to choose between existing users and new users. > > We do work directly with nvidia on the nvidia Solaris driver, > and know about new versions before they are posted, so if you > see we've fallen behind, you can safely assume it's because > we have a reason, not just because we haven't noticed yet. > Just to add more detail.
Sun shipped an unknown (to me, at least) quantity of NV18GL based NVS 280 boards in the W1100z/W2100z systems. If we move the NVIDIA driver from 1.0-96xx to something more recent, those users will see a marked drop in functionality and performance as it will/should fall back to the nv driver. There is also a risk NVIDIA will reuse a PCI device or subsystem id for a new board (and, yes, it has already happened). The failure mode here is worse because it prevents the system from booting if the console is the graphics board. Until we sort out how to get different drivers to peacefully coexist (there are lots of issues yet to solve) we will continue to bundle the "legacy" 1.0-96xx driver. We are backporting some of the major fixes from the current release driver -- a new version should happen within a month. There a also fixes in the legacy driver bundled in Nevada that are not yet in the current release, so those forced to use the legacy driver should feel too shorted. Things will get sticky very soon since we will begin to offer G8x based boards which will require the current release driver. The preinstall image on new systems with these cards will have the current release driver. For others it will require downloading and installing the current release driver. We are currently testing a new release of the 100.14.xx drivers that will replace 100.14.11. This should happen soon enough that if you are thinking about trying out the 100.14.11 drivers, you may want to wait a few days for the new version.
