video card for amd64

John Baldwin jhb at freebsd.org
Thu Oct 19 11:01:44 PDT 2006


On Thursday 19 October 2006 13:06, Mike Meyer wrote:
> > Because our kernel doesn't yet provide all the features the driver needs.
> 
> But it does for the i386? That seems really strange...

For good performance with i386 and PCI-e it needs the changes on i386 as
well, but amd64 needs it at a more basic level.

> > I've added some of them, but mroe stuff is needed.  Nvidia sent out an
> > e-mail a while back listing the things they need as far as kernel support.
> > Given their willingness to do a driver and my interactions with both
> > ATI (in the past) and Nvidia, I'd say that Nvidia supports FreeBSD much
> > more than ATI at this point.  Note that ATI only opened up their documents
> > for the older R2xx cards under an NDA to developers working for a company
> > that was under contract to develop a driver, not out of the goodness of 
their 
> > heart.  To my knowledge, Nvidia is not providing a FreeBSD driver due to a 
> > commercial contract, but closer to "out of the goodness of their heart."
> 
> Where did the docs for the R3xx and R4xx cards come from? They didn't
> get 3d support, but they at least got better support than the nvidia
> cards.

I wasn't aware that they even had docs, but were reverse engineering it and/or
depending on the R2xx docs, since 2d interfaces tends to change a lot less
(and be simpler) than 3d.

-- 
John Baldwin


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