[FreeBSD-Announce] FreeBSD 12.0 end-of-life

Lorenzo Salvadore phascolarctos at protonmail.ch
Fri Feb 21 16:36:36 UTC 2020


‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Friday 21 February 2020 17:30, Jerry <jerry at seibercom.net> wrote:

> On Fri, 21 Feb 2020 16:09:38 +0100, Polytropon stated:
>
> > On Fri, 21 Feb 2020 10:14:09 +0100, Tomasz CEDRO wrote:
> >
> > > This is exactly the reason why I have switched from nVidia to AMD
> > > RADEON and planning no return!!
> > > Because nVidia does not provide documentation nor support to
> > > Open-Source, only binary blobs, you start to think that their drivers
> > > are the best because "they just work"^TM. Nothing more misleading!
> > > nVidia seems to have no respect in the Open-Source community. I was
> > > also astonished with that being their 20 years long loyal customer.
> > > When you look at the true Open-Source drivers, you will notice they
> > > are poor and you cannot really do anything more with nVidia than just
> > > display.
> >
> > Exactly my impression. While there are several (I think, 3)
> > open source nVidia drivers, all of them have problems. Some
> > just offer 3D graphics, others won't work in 64 bit OS mode,
> > and others just freeze when being loaded. The binary blob is
> > the only way to get proper 3D support.
> >
> > > Open-Source RADEON drivers in general are by some considered even
> > > better than binary blobs provided by AMD.
> >
> > Interesting. This seems to be a "ride back to the past" where
> > ATI (which was the typical brand name of the Radeon-type GPUs
> > at that time) was always superior to nVidia: 3D support out of
> > the box, with the standard drivers included with X. Then there
> > was a time where nVidia was considered better than ATI / AMD
> > (again, judging from the binary blob driver!), and today, AMD
> > using the open source drivers seems to be the way to go.
> >
> > > Here comes the development of DRM layer that is something brand new
> > > in FreeBSD that will support all new GPU in a truly Open-Source
> > > fashion (but hey where does that firmware comes from??).
> >
> > Don't ask the firmware question. Don't ask any questions
> > going below the visibility level. ;-)
>
> Interestingly enough, nVidia is the only card/driver combination that I
> have ever gotten good results with. Part of the problem might be that
> the version of the nVidia driver offered in the ports system is rarely
> current, For instance, right now the port version is
> nvidia-driver-440.31_1, while the latest version available for FreeBSD
> -x64 is version 440.59. The port version was released 11/04/2019. Plus,
> I wonder how many users actually download and use
> the utilities for nVidia that are available in the ports system. Also,
> I would be interested in what 'card' the end used is employing and
> supposedly not receiving optimal results.

If someone wants to test it we have a patch to update
nvidia-driver to latest version:
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=242177

Lorenzo Salvadore


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