Re: nVidia FX Support?

From: Jason Andresen <jandrese_at_mitre.org>
Date: Thu, 06 May 2004 11:53:03 -0400
Kenneth Culver wrote:

> Quoting Jason Andresen <jandrese_at_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.


-- 
   \  |_ _|__ __|_ \ __| Jason Andresen        jandrese_at_mitre.org
  |\/ |  |    |    / _|  Network and Distributed Systems Engineer
_|  _|___|  _| _|_\___| Office: 703-883-7755
Received on Thu May 06 2004 - 06:53:07 UTC

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