i give up

[Matt Dawson]

On Thursday 04 December 2008 22:15:11 freebsd-current-request at freebsd.org 
wrote:
> > I'm not referring to ATI/AMDs proprietary drivers.  They are providing
> > open documentation now, as well as information that isn't yet public
> > when I ask for it.  So, I'm speaking about the open drm/mesa/Xorg
> > driver, which afaik is working pretty well on r500 and below now.
> >
> > robert.
>
> Well, yeah. I was referring to the proprietary drivers though, because
> all you get is 2D acceleration with the open ATI/nVidia drivers.
> Given the fact that r500 is rather old too though... that lags a lot
> more behind nVidia -- but I'm sure that's due to volunteering and lack
> of man-hours because nVidia has a few devs dedicated towards
> maintaining their driver on *BSD.

Actually, no. The subset of ATi cards Robert refers to has direct rendering 
support on the to-be-committed (after the ports repo is thawed) Xorg 7.4, DRM 
kernel update (which is already in -HEAD) and new Mesa. I have personally 
tested R200-R480 cards here with good results, after some time messing about 
with nVidia hardware under the same illusion that they are better supported. 
Even the troublesome RS48x (Radeon XPress 200/1100M IGP) which I had abandoned 
all hope of ever seeing DRM working upon now works with the open driver, 
although there are still rendering issues with some 3D workloads using ports' 
Xorg and Mesa.

nVidia's team consists of Christian Zander and another guy (whose name eludes 
me right now) as far as I can tell. "Our" team consists of work already done 
by Eric Anholt, by whose own admission no longer uses FreeBSD and most of it 
over 24 months old, and Robert. Also, the open ATi driver/DRI/DRM works 
(again, verified here) to the same standard on amd64 as it does on i386. This 
is not the case with nVidia's proprietary driver, so quite how nVidia's 
offering leads the OSS ATi driver escapes me right now. Robert's work in this 
area over the past few months has brought this hardware, along with many of 
the Intel IGPs, almost bang up to date. Only the R6/700 cards lack 3D/2D 
accel/possibly Xv (I could be wrong on that last item, but the man page still 
says no support) but this work is ongoing.

One more little niggle in nVidia's direction: The OSS ATi driver integrates 
with the base system and ports' Xorg without having to faff about. nVidia's 
screws up the system config with odd .so files and symlinks to the point that 
manual intervention is required to upgrade xorg-server and get the linuxulator 
working. Not optimal, IMHO.

Bottom line is we have rather good support in -CURRENT for ATi cards and 
similar in -STABLE with Robert's patches applied. This is probably set to get 
a whole lot better when 7.1-RELEASE shows up (I doubt the DRM kernel stuff 
will be MFC'd to 7.1, but I'd like to be wrong) and we get the new stuff into 
ports. When one compares the resource gap between Robert's dedicated volunteer 
efforts and two full-time paid nVidia devs with full docs, this is nothing 
short of amazing and I, for one, am very grateful.
-- 
Matt Dawson

ku.gro.sonorhc at ttam
MTD15-RIPE
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