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Date:      Tue, 6 Aug 2002 11:57:53 +0200
From:      Pierre Beyssac <beyssac@enst.fr>
To:        Bill Huey <billh@gnuppy.monkey.org>
Cc:        Frank Mayhar <frank@exit.com>, Alp ATICI <atici@cpw.math.columbia.edu>, Ed Yu <edlyu@yahoo.com>, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: About 5.0 and Nvidia drivers
Message-ID:  <20020806115753.A85868@bofh.enst.fr>
In-Reply-To: <20020806040903.GA4316@gnuppy.monkey.org>; from billh@gnuppy.monkey.org on Mon, Aug 05, 2002 at 09:09:03PM -0700
References:  <Pine.LNX.4.44.0208050157420.15528-100000@cpw.math.columbia.edu> <200208051636.g75GaamW000669@realtime.exit.com> <20020806040903.GA4316@gnuppy.monkey.org>

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On Mon, Aug 05, 2002 at 09:09:03PM -0700, Bill Huey wrote:
> First of all, the NVidia driver I've been using under Linux has given me
> zero problems over the years. It's a great card with good performance and
> a pretty solid driver.
> 
> As far as the sources go, they open sourced the parts of it that are OS
> specific so that it can be ported using its native PCI supporting functions,
> having the rest is kind of silly. Their supporting engineers are pretty

As you describe it, it would be almost acceptable. But that's not
as simple as that as I recall it. The supposedly "portable" part
is still a Linux i386 object file -- maybe Nvidia's definition of
portable, but not mine.

It does a heavy use of Linux ioctls to call Linux DRM and Linux AGP
and getting that to run under FreeBSD DRM and FreeBSD AGP ioctls
is far from easy because the ioctl calling convention is quite
different. So it's far from what I would call OS- or
architecture-independent stuff. This is for the XFree-server part
IIRC; the DRI client part is probably much uglier to deal with. So
essentially the easiest (albeit kludgy) approach is to get that to
run in a Linux XFree server under the Linux emulator, and even then
it's much easier said than done.

It's been months since I've looked into this, so my memory may not
be totaly accurate, but I think that's the general idea.
-- 
Pierre Beyssac						pb@enst.fr

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