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Date:      Fri, 7 May 2004 11:00:16 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org>
To:        Doug Rabson <dfr@nlsystems.com>
Cc:        freebsd-current@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: nVidia FX Support?
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0405071058180.95616-100000@InterJet.elischer.org>
In-Reply-To: <1083948649.5822.7.camel@builder02.qubesoft.com>

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That's good news..

I haven't seen any submits for a while and had assumed that Real
Life(TM) was taking a priority for a while..
I didn; know that you had reached that point already!


I assume you are talking about static TLS?

Can you give an executive summary of where we are on this?

thanks!


On Fri, 7 May 2004, Doug Rabson wrote:

> On Thu, 2004-05-06 at 20:09, Julian Elischer wrote:
> > On Thu, 6 May 2004, Jason Andresen wrote:
> > 
> > > Kenneth Culver wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Quoting Jason Andresen <jandrese@mitre.org>:
> > > > 
> > > >> Will Andrews wrote:
> > > >>
> > > >>> On Wed, May 05, 2004 at 11:28:57AM +0200, Dimitry Andric wrote:
> > > >>>
> > > >>>> The problem is that NVidia hasn't updated its binary-only FreeBSD
> > > >>>> driver since July 1st, 2003.  Any cards released after this date will
> > > >>>> not work properly, or at all, with this driver.  So please go bug
> > > >>>> NVidia. :)
> > > >>>>
> > > >>>> But, see also this thread:
> > > >>>> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-threads/2003-June/000530.html
> > > >>>>
> > > >>>>
> > > >>>> which might explain why it takes forever for new drivers to arrive. :(
> > > >>
> > > >>
> > > >> Ugh, reading through that thread I got a bad bad feeling that it will be
> > > >> ages before we see another NVidia driver.  The NVidia engineer is
> > > >> unwilling to proceed without his %gs register, and the FreeBSD engineers
> > > >> are unwilling to give it to him because the fast thread switching needs
> > > >> it for good performance.  The NVidia engineers needs the %gs register
> > > >> for good performance, and will not release drivers that are 10-50%
> > > >> slower than the Windows ones.
> > > >>
> > > >> It looks like the whole situation is at a standstill at the moment,
> > > >> which means we get no new drivers until the whole thing is sorted out.
> > > >> It's really distressing to see how frustrated the NVidia engineer was by
> > > >> the end of the thread.
> > > >>
> > > > I'm pretty sure that the FreeBSD people are working on TLS, which will 
> > > > allow the
> > > > nvidia people to be happy.
> > > 
> > > Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but it seems like TLS is what got them in 
> > > all of this trouble in the first place.  It seems that FreeBSD's 
> > > implementation uses the %gs register, which NVidia also wants to use.
> > 
> > %gs is not theirs to use.. linux also uses the %gs register
> > for thread identification
> > 
> > however when TLS is implemented then they will 'piggyback' on th thread
> > sytem, (so to speak).
> 
> For what its worth, TLS works nicely in the P4 kse branch for i386.
> 
> 
> 



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