Re: Call for Foundation-supported Project Ideas

On 12/1/21 11:01, Floyd, Paul wrote:
> On 2021-11-30 18:55, Stefan Blachmann wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> When I first installed Fedora, it defaulted to nouveau = black screen.
> 
> So I switched to non-free nvidia. This breaks on a fairly regular basis 
> due to incompatible kernel changes. DKMS will try to rebuild the kernel 
> module, which fails = black screen. I retried nouveau again a couple of 
> times, still always a black screen. That gave me the impression that 
> nouveau is unmaintained. Sounds like I was wrong there.
> 
> You kind of get used to it, hitting alt-f2 for a console login and 
> waiting a few days or weeks for non-free nvidia to catch up.
> 
> By comparison I've had almost no problems with the nvidia drivers on 
> FreeBSD.
> 
> A+
> 
> Paul

I have only one anecdote from CentOS, where the closed-source nVidia 
drivers caused breakage during routine Yum updates.  I switched the 
machine to nouveau and everything was fine from then on.

I've also seen the closed-source drivers cause an occasional panic on 
FreeBSD.  Seems less of a problem recently than many years ago.

-- 
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