Re: Call for Foundation-supported Project Ideas

On 11/30/21 11:55, Stefan Blachmann wrote:
> On 11/30/21, Stefan Esser <se@freebsd.org> wrote:
>> ULE does not care for the "niceness" of a process and lets nice -19
>> processes run with hardly any reduction of the share of CPU cycles
>> granted compared to competing nice 0 processes, for example.
> 
> I can confirm this... always believed it's just me.
> I'd like very much if renicing would have more, actually usable, effect.
> 
> 
> On 11/30/21, Jason Bacon <bacon4000@gmail.com> wrote:
>> If your nVidia cards are basically landfill, like some of mine, and you
>> don't care about 3D support, xf86-video-nv still works in some case that
>> would otherwise call for v304.  I wonder if it would be a simple matter
>> to add support to it for some additional older hardware supported by
>> v340.  Yes, I know nv is deprecated, but this may be the only solution
>> for ancient hardware.
> 
> Actually xf86-video-nv overlaps into the range of what is supported by
> nvidia-driver-304.
> Practically all nvidia proprietary drivers overlap in their range of
> supported cards with the "adjacent" versions.
> So it is common, for example, to see the newer ones of the cards that
> are supported by 390 are still supported by, for example, 470, while
> the older ones still supported by 390 are supported by 340, too, but
> not by 4xx.
> 
> The bad thing now is that with nvidia having already dropped 304 and
> 340 support, the next xorg ABI change will render the "middle field"
> (eg not yet historic, but not yet very new either) of nvidia cards
> useless on FreeBSD if there is no nouveau port.
> 
> 
> On 11/30/21, Floyd, Paul <paulf2718@gmail.com> wrote:
>> However I'm not sure that porting nouveau will help. My experience on
>> Fedora is that nouveau simply never works.
> 
> Never used Fedora. Maybe it's because Fedora is very close to
> commercial RHEL which might be not really targeted at desktop?
> Personally, I never have tried Fedora, but used several other distros.
> Nouveau always worked fine for me. So no idea what's the cause the
> difficulties you are experiencing on Fedora.
> 
> On practically every Linux distro Nouveau is the quasi standard driver
> for any type of Nvidia cards, as the proprietary Nvidia drivers are
> non-free category.
> So I think one can consider Nouveau as very well-tested and reliable
> and that porting it to FreeBSD would be worthwhile, profiting many
> users who would else either have to buy a new graphics card or migrate
> to Linux.
> 

A Nouveau port, if it works reliably and supports all the same hardware 
as the closed-source drivers, would greatly simplify things for 
sysutils/desktop-installer.

I recall reading in a distant thread that the Nouveau developers are 
friendly to the idea of a FreeBSD port and the barriers are only 
technical.  So maybe this is worth some investment if we have someone 
with the right skills available.

-- 
All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers ... Each one owes
infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in
which he was born.
                 -- Francois Fenelon