What can I do?

Adam K Kirchhoff adamk at voicenet.com
Thu Mar 22 14:14:33 UTC 2007


On Thursday 22 March 2007 09:55, Florent Thoumie wrote:
> Adam K Kirchhoff wrote:
> > On Thursday 22 March 2007 09:43, Florent Thoumie wrote:
> >> Adam K Kirchhoff wrote:
> >>> On Thursday 22 March 2007 08:54, Florent Thoumie wrote:
> >>>> Adam K Kirchhoff wrote:
> >>>>> I'm glad to see that there are people working on fixing ports that
> >>>>> break due to the move to modular and the change to X11BASE, but I'm
> >>>>> curious if anyone is actively working on fixing the bugs actually
> >>>>> present in Xorg 7.2 on FreeBSD (ie. AIGLX, ATI pcigart support,
> >>>>> etc.)?
> >>>>
> >>>> I am not. I have no idea what the problems are, or how to solve them.
> >>>> Just so we're clear, it won't stop X.org 7.2 happening in ports :-)
> >>>
> >>> So it's going to be rolled out even though one of the great new and
> >>> improved features of 7.2 is broken on FreeBSD? :-)
> >>>
> >>> Well, it's not my decision to make, but it seems like a bad decision to
> >>> me.
> >>
> >> Too bad you're not the one to decide then :-)
> >>
> >> Feel free to clone my git repo and maintain xorg out of the tree until
> >> this is resolved. Cause once we fixed all broken ports, if it's not
> >> going in, don't ask me to do anymore work on Xorg. I think I had my
> >> share (and a fair one).
> >
> > Please understand that I am very appreciative of all the work you guys
> > are doing.  It's been a major undertaking, and you've gone a hell of a
> > job.  It's just sad, for me, to see that the only way to get a stable 3D
> > desktop in FreeBSD currently, and in the foreseeable future, is
> > exclusively with nVidia cards.
>
> FWIW, beryl is currently broken on my nVidia machines as well.
>
> I understand perfectly what you mean, but let me summarize how things
> work, people work on that kind of stuff because of interest and/or
> money. Sadly I'm not interested in working on this and I have no
> particular knowledge that I could sell to fix AIGLX or pcigart.
>
> Your best bet is to ask xorg developers.

Hmmm...  Well, I haven't tried with my nVidia card since January, but it did 
work back then.  

In any case, I am aware of how open source development works :-)  I've been 
following the DRI project for years now, and have seen developers come and 
go.  And, just as you described, they work on what they want to work on or 
what they're being paid to work on.  I imagine this is true with the FreeBSD 
project and Xorg, too.

Unfortunately, FreeBSD has always played catch-up with linux when it came to 
3D acceleration.  Let's face it, the hardware vendors only care about 3D 
acceleration on Linux (if that), and the developers who do this because they 
love it primarily use Linux.  The FreeBSD project lost a great asset when 
Eric Anholt went to work for Intel, and it's a shame the FreeBSD project has 
not been able to replace him with someone as knowledgeable about the DRI.  
Till that happens, I believe FreeBSD is going to continue to trail behind 
linux in regards to newer features and functionality.  

In the mean time I'll continue to leave FreeBSD on my system at home, though I 
rarely boot into it these days... I still have my bugreport open about the 
broken ati pcigart, so if there's ever a change, I'll hopefully be able to 
test it.  Even, for me, AIGLX is not that important if I can just get basic 
3D acceleration going again, so I'll just have to keep my fingers crossed.

Thanks again for your hard work.


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