Re: Nvidia 390 drivers that are provided are outdated.

On Tue, 27 May 2025 23:22:49 +0300
Ali Emir Oktay <aliemiroktay20@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> I wanted you to inform that the Nvidia 390 driver which is supplied by
> FreeBSD repositories is outdated. The version that the repositories supply
> is 390.154, where the latest driver supplied for FreeBSD by Nvidia is
> 390.157. This might change things. The Nvidia drivers on unix-like
> are notorious to be incompatible, because of being close source and Nvidia
> not caring about it. So, the driver you supply might break the whole
> system down. It should be changed before FreeBSD 15 is out.

First of all, there's freebsd-ports ML for discussing about
ports like this. But putting it aside here.

It should be just because you're on quarterly (now 2025Q2) branch.

  https://cgit.freebsd.org/ports/commit/x11/nvidia-driver-390?id=ca078ddb10f6a138dd0dfa73fa2e79bf4cee9922

main (aka latest) branch of ports tree already has 390.157.
If you want up-to-date version, consider switching to latest
(main) branch.


Some note about such delays:
Before a change of our policy about x11/nvidia-driver and friends at

  https://cgit.freebsd.org/ports/commit/x11/nvidia-driver-390?id=9506d5a4e7134abd57d5d001edb1a092c11d1291

all informations of files to be downloaded for legacy branches
were centralized in x11/nvidia-driver and x11/linux-nvidia-libs.

This caused collisions of upates thus, large delay and forgotton.
So we now split the information (distinfo) into per-(legacy-)port
basis.

But as our resources are limited (GPUs to test legacy drivers,
human resources), legacy versions are basically tested for
building and packaging only. So for runtime problems, we need
your info. Please don't hesitate to file a bug on Bugzilla.


We wouldn't MFC to quarterly unless Release Highlights upstream
includes CVE number. This makes 3 months settling time at maximum
for us to see any new regressions are reported and (hopefully)
fixed (if possible on ports side) before next quarterly branches.
At worst, we can revert the update before next quarterly
not to break things for quarterly branch users.

Note that we, who are actually maintaining ports, are basically
volunteers and without sponsorship. Limited persons are
full time worker employed and supported by FreeBSD foundation
and/or some corporates supporting us, and some corporates
would be allowing to work for OSS like FreeBSD in partial
working time. But such cases are quite limited and many are
100% volunteer with their own private budgets like me.

So please report problems you encountered and be patient.
Not everyone are trillionairs that can purchase and hold
ALL products in hand.

-- 
Tomoaki AOKI    <junchoon@dec.sakura.ne.jp>