Sam Fourman Jr. wrote on Sun, Dec 09, 2007 at 01:09:53AM -0600: > Hello, > > I am aware that currently 3D accelerated support for Nvidia cards is > not possible on the amd64 platform. > > My understanding is Nvidia (in 2006) requested some changes to the > kernel that will improve performance,and > ultimately provide support to the amd64 platform. > the status of these changes can be found here > http://wiki.freebsd.org/NvidiaFeatureRequests > > what I am confused about is how complex is the nature of these requests? > is it realistic to think they will be MFC'ed to FreeBSD 7.x or will > they have to be in 8.x ? > > assuming the changes outlined here > http://wiki.freebsd.org/NvidiaFeatureRequests are completed > > would the Features and performance be on par with Linux Eg. FC8 ? Yeah, but what I don't understand is why it was fine to provide other drivers without all these VM gizmos and now suddenly it's not. I really couldn't care less whether I have 10% or even 70% preformance regression compared to Linux because my 7800GTX will still run Google Earth just fine. Anyway... A problem with that feature list is that the specification is not hardened by regression tests. People would feel more comfortable tackling this list if every feature would be acompanied by an example C program (respectively a FreeBSD kernel module implementing piece of C code) that uses the desired API, aka "make this compile and work". Using Linux API calls where FreeBSD currently doesn't have an equivalent would be fine. You can see that of the five projects currently listed on the Wiki the three projects which mention concreate APIs have been signed up for (I know for a loose definition of it) and the fluffy ones (numbers 2 and 4) have the hot potato aura. Not to mention that those two fluffy projects not attracting anybody are only needed for systems with more than 4 GB of RAM. I think that these 3D drivers are likely to be used for systems that are either desktops or gaming machines and a driver with a 4 GB limitation would be fine for the majority of users. Myself, I feel the desire for more than 4 GB on my "desktop" only when hosting lots of VMware instances, but that's hardly something that a FreeBSD desktop gets used for these days. A "one step after another" approach seems to be a good compromise here and NVidia just plain demanding all these features before they even start doesn't seem productive. Not to go on endlessly but also note this: "The FreeBSD kernel provides some support for this via cloning devices; the NVIDIA FreeBSD graphics driver used this interface for a while, but bugs/limitations and differences between kernel versions made it necessary to revert to regular device nodes.". So the i386 port works without this feature but an amd64 port won't even get started without it? Martin -- %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Martin Cracauer <cracauer_at_cons.org> http://www.cons.org/cracauer/ FreeBSD - where you want to go, today. http://www.freebsd.org/Received on Mon Dec 17 2007 - 22:26:00 UTC
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