Date: Sat, 29 Jul 2000 23:59:17 +0800 From: Trent Nelson <tpnelson@echidna.stu.cowan.edu.au> To: behanna@zbzoom.net Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Linux NVIDIA drivers vs. default XFree86 drivers (WAS: RE: Video card support) Message-ID: <3982FF55.2AD5356E@echidna.stu.cowan.edu.au> References: <Pine.WNT.4.21.0007281115210.350-100000@armani.yourfit.com>
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Moving to hackers@, where most discussions regarding the NVIDIA drivers seem to take place lately. Chris BeHanna wrote: > I don't remember if it was this list on which I saw this > discussion, or if it was hackers. Anyway, I looked at xfree86.org > today, and noticed that there is accelerated support for ATI Mach64 > and for NVIDIA TNT2 and GeForce256 boards, as well as many others. > > Is there some reason why this isn't "good enough," or do we > really need actual drivers for these boards to get at their > extra-nifty features (e.g., hardware backface culling, fog, bump maps, > etc.)? The NVIDIA drivers for XFree86 are the result of a collaborative effort between NVIDIA, SGI and VA Linux. Concentration, as far as I know, has been focused on OpenGL development in the new DRI environment XFree86 4.0 provides. You could speculate that with fairly high calibre companies partaking in such an effort - where there's obviously a fair amount of financial investment - their drivers are going to perform better than those provided with XFree86. For those interested, it is the code of the accelerated OpenGL driver/libraries that NVIDIA are distributing as Linux binaries (i.e. closed-source). The only source that *is* provided is for the cards' kernel device driver. I remember reading somewhere on NVIDIA's site that the only reason they're providing *this* code is because Linux's kernel module loading mechanism prevents the introduction of foreign pre-compiled binary objects as system device drivers. So, effectively, a kernel device driver has to be compiled on the system natively before it can be used (?). It was something along those lines, anyway. Someone should tell NVIDIA there's a lot more to "Open Source" than just writing closed-source drivers for Linux. On a more technical note, given an accurate port of the kernel device driver (which would be trivial at best), is there any reason these Linux OpenGL drivers & associated libraries can't just be branded as 'Linux' object types and handled as-per-normal by linux.ko? After all, it's the kernel driver's responsibility to manage all the Operating System's specific hardware resource management etc. I'm doubting it's that easy, though. > Chris BeHanna > Software Engineer (at yourfit.com) Regards, Trent. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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