Glaring 64 bit omission

[Mike Meyer]

On Tue, 8 Jul 2008 18:21:27 -0400
"Zaphod Beeblebrox" <zbeeble at gmail.com> wrote:

> I was just following up to a post in the forms nvidia supports regarding the
> graphics cards and FreeBSD when it struck me...

Rather late....

> Possibly one of the most important glaring omissions to the current FreeBSD
> platform and it's associated desktop projects is the lack of an nvidia 3D
> driver.

It's been this way for quite a while.

> _That_ being said, it seems that these kernel items should be on a priority
> list for 8.0 (and possibly even delaying 8.0 until we can achieve them so
> that 64bit nvidia support (arriving in -STABLE) is not delayed another year
> or two).

I'm sure it's on quite a few people's priority lists. Unfortunately
for them (yup, them - I don't do 3d on my desktop) none of them appear
to be on the important list of people regarding this issue: the list
of people with both the time and skills needed to deal with these
kernel items.

Which is the root of the problem: FreeBSD is a volunteer
effort. There's not a lot of incentive to fix a problem that doesn't
affect you directly (and the FreeBSD folks are to be congratulated for
how well they do on such issues in general!)  - and as you point out,
this is a rather deep problem. Pointing out that "this issue is N
years old and hasn't been addressed" isn't constructive - everyone who
could deal with it certainly knows about it by now.

That said, since you believe this should be a priority, and have
listed how it affects you personally, what have you done that *is*
constructive? The obvious ones would be submitting patches that seem
to move things in the right direction, or establishing a bounty for
such patches. Done either of those? Something I overlooked?

     <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>		http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.

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