Re: nVidia FX Support?

Quoting Jason Andresen <jandrese_at_mitre.org>:

> 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.
>
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/todo.html

According to the above page, TLS isn't implemented:
GCC 3.4 is needed to support TLS on all our our Tier-1 platforms. It also is
likely to be better maintained by the FSF during the lifespan on 5.x than GCC
3.3 is.

There are a few other entries there relating to TLS as well.

Ken