amd64 NVIDIA support in FreeBSD 7

[Martin Cracauer]

Sam Fourman Jr. wrote on Sun, Dec 09, 2007 at 01:09:53AM -0600: 
> Hello,
> 
> I am aware that currently 3D accelerated support for Nvidia cards is
> not possible on the amd64 platform.
> 
> My understanding  is Nvidia (in 2006) requested some changes to the
> kernel that will improve performance,and
> ultimately provide support to the amd64 platform.
> the status of these changes can be found here
> http://wiki.freebsd.org/NvidiaFeatureRequests
> 
> what I am confused about is how complex is the nature of these requests?
> is it realistic to think they will be MFC'ed to FreeBSD 7.x  or will
> they have to be in 8.x ?
> 
> assuming the changes outlined here
> http://wiki.freebsd.org/NvidiaFeatureRequests are completed
> 
> would the Features and performance be on par with Linux Eg. FC8 ?

Yeah, but what I don't understand is why it was fine to provide other
drivers without all these VM gizmos and now suddenly it's not.  I
really couldn't care less whether I have 10% or even 70% preformance
regression compared to Linux because my 7800GTX will still run Google
Earth just fine.  Anyway...

A problem with that feature list is that the specification is not
hardened by regression tests.  People would feel more comfortable
tackling this list if every feature would be acompanied by an example
C program (respectively a FreeBSD kernel module implementing piece of
C code) that uses the desired API, aka "make this compile and work".
Using Linux API calls where FreeBSD currently doesn't have an
equivalent would be fine.

You can see that of the five projects currently listed on the Wiki the
three projects which mention concreate APIs have been signed up for (I
know for a loose definition of it) and the fluffy ones (numbers 2 and
4) have the hot potato aura.

Not to mention that those two fluffy projects not attracting anybody
are only needed for systems with more than 4 GB of RAM.  I think that
these 3D drivers are likely to be used for systems that are either
desktops or gaming machines and a driver with a 4 GB limitation would
be fine for the majority of users.  Myself, I feel the desire for more
than 4 GB on my "desktop" only when hosting lots of VMware instances,
but that's hardly something that a FreeBSD desktop gets used for these
days.  A "one step after another" approach seems to be a good
compromise here and NVidia just plain demanding all these features
before they even start doesn't seem productive.

Not to go on endlessly but also note this: "The FreeBSD kernel
provides some support for this via cloning devices; the NVIDIA FreeBSD
graphics driver used this interface for a while, but bugs/limitations
and differences between kernel versions made it necessary to revert to
regular device nodes.".  So the i386 port works without this feature
but an amd64 port won't even get started without it?

Martin
-- 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Martin Cracauer <cracauer at cons.org>   http://www.cons.org/cracauer/
FreeBSD - where you want to go, today.      http://www.freebsd.org/