From owner-freebsd-stable Wed Jul 26 2:50:48 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mel.alcatel.fr (mel.alcatel.fr [212.208.74.132]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3D79837BE9F for ; Wed, 26 Jul 2000 02:50:42 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from Thierry.Herbelot@alcatel.fr) Received: from aifhs10.alcatel.fr (mailhub2.alcatel.fr [155.132.188.80]) by mel.alcatel.fr (ALCANET/SMTP) with ESMTP id LAA31560; Wed, 26 Jul 2000 11:50:11 +0200 From: Thierry.Herbelot@alcatel.fr Received: from frmta003.netfr.alcatel.fr (frmta003.netfr.alcatel.fr [155.132.251.32]) by aifhs10.alcatel.fr (ALCANET/SMTP2) with SMTP id LAA16955; Wed, 26 Jul 2000 11:47:19 +0200 (MET DST) Received: by frmta003.netfr.alcatel.fr(Lotus SMTP MTA v4.6.6 (890.1 7-16-1999)) id C1256928.003612AB ; Wed, 26 Jul 2000 11:50:37 +0200 X-Lotus-FromDomain: ALCATEL To: Coleman Kane Cc: Mike Muir , Coleman Kane , freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Message-ID: Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2000 11:50:28 +0200 Subject: Re: agp and 3dfx Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hello, I've got a mixed feeling towards the binary driver for NVidia boards : - there an "emotional" and "political" aspect to the issue, which is to have all of FreeBSD available as source, with the Berkeley Licence. This has allowed the project to change the driver infrastucture, for example (passage to CAM for SCSI, or the recent transition to newbus) without asking permission to people outside the project. With this viewpoint it is not acceptable to use a binary-only driver for the NVidia boards (anyway, the competition is such in the graphics board market that 3dfx or ATI **could** have trouble inspecting the NVidia sources fast enough to incorporate the new ideas) - there is another "industrial" aspect : the exact same "feature" of the FreeBSD project, which is the total control of the interfaces between the kernel, the drivers and userland is damaging in the sense that it seems difficult to expect form third-parties to write drivers for FreeBSD if the interfaces change too often (is there any kld which is not part of the standard FreeBSD releases ? - is there any manufacturer which delivers binary-only drivers to its boards ?) - the stabilization (if at all possible) of the driver-kernel interface and the accompanying delivery of shrink-wrapped drivers would be a great plus to the credibility of FreeBSD Just my 0.2 Euro .... TfH Coleman Kane on 26/07/2000 00:23:33 To: Mike Muir cc: Coleman Kane , freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG(bcc: Thierry HERBELOT/FR/ALCATEL) Subject: Re: agp and 3dfx The 3dfx cards do work under FreeBSD, just not using glide. XFree86 4+ uses DRI to accomplish its 3D acceleration. If you want to use glide games through linux emulation, you can either run them as root (not acceptable many times, at least for me :), or you will be able to use them with this driver once it gets the last bugs worked out. It works fine for Voodoo1's and 2's, just have some trouble with the resource setup on the Voodoo 3's. As far as the NVidia binary drivers go, I don't think they are planning any releases for FreeBSD. Personally, I don't want to endorse this sort of behavior from manufacturers like NVidia giving out binary-only drivers. I don't buy their cards because of that, and also because I can't afford them. There is a small amount of total IP that can be gotten from reading source code, and it is too small for a company to bother trying to parse through to understand. They'd wate too much time trying to figure it out, that it wouldn't matter once they were done. Anyway, I don't want to go out on a rant about lame business practices, the basic idea here is no, NVidia doesn't provide binary only drivers for FreeBSD, and we don't really care for the idea of closed source drivers. Closed source drivers just make it a pain for everyone to get work done from installation to associated programming (say, extensions to the drivers). I'm not gonna go into a holy war here or reveal what I think they are closing them for, but basically, they are not expected to come ever. You can simply use the included on in XFree86 4.0.1, which I think supposrts DRI. [SNIP] -- Coleman Kane President, UC Free O.S. Users Group - http://pohl.ececs.uc.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message