Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2008 18:21:27 -0400 From: "Zaphod Beeblebrox" <zbeeble@gmail.com> To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Glaring 64 bit omission Message-ID: <5f67a8c40807081521o1f32660ak392672da61e490fd@mail.gmail.com>
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I was just following up to a post in the forms nvidia supports regarding the graphics cards and FreeBSD when it struck me... Possibly one of the most important glaring omissions to the current FreeBSD platform and it's associated desktop projects is the lack of an nvidia 3D driver. Now I do follow the various forums and mailing lists sufficiently to be quite aware of the requests that nvidia has made for the FreeBSD kernel, the latest reported status on these items and the discussions about these items. I am even somewhat familliar with the efforts for open source drivers on both nvidia (barely supporting 2D at this point) and 3D drivers on other types of hardware (Intel and AMD) In the other forum, I commented that in all my reading, I had not come across someone saying that either a) the nvidia requests seemed unneccary or even b) that the nvidia requests served only the interests of nvida or some narrow (possibly bad) design of hardware. Now... the kernel modifications seem rather major to my untrained eye... something that seems highly unlikely to be considered for MFC. That being the case, it's already too late to consider nvidia cards working on AMD-64 in 7.x. _That_ being said, it seems that these kernel items should be on a priority list for 8.0 (and possibly even delaying 8.0 until we can achieve them so that 64bit nvidia support (arriving in -STABLE) is not delayed another year or two). Although AMD64 is a new platform, it was a platform born out of desperation. There's good evidence for this position in the amount of sheer crow Intel had to consume by supporting the architecture. I multi-boot my laptop to take advantage of it's DUAL-8800M video cards, but I also spend much of my time in amd64 mode because I find i386 too restrictive (for ZFS, for application size, for amount of supported RAM, etc.). In fact, running ZFS in 32 bit mode seems to run the system out of resources required to run 3D application (although there is talk on the FreeBSD lists that future ZFS patches may mitigate this behaviour --- but the fact seems to remain that both ZFS and nvidia require gobs of kernel resources --- which in turn both point to 64 bit OS).
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