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Accelerated nVidia Drivers for FreeBSD

Posted by michael on from the bring-out-all-the-freebsd-games dept.

zero0w writes "nVidia has released the official OpenGL accelerated driver set for FreeBSD 4.7 STABLE. Check out the nVidia Driver page for more detail. According to the page, this release should be considered as initial beta. So don't count on it to build a day-to-day production system, yet."

10 of 293 comments (clear)

  1. FreeBSD != Linux by OrangeSpyderMan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The nvidia page is fairly annoying on this point - the direct link to the drivers is under a subtitle "For Linux Users", and on the installation instructions we can read, "Please note that the NVIDIA driver set requires XFree version 4.2 or greater. If this is not available on your linux distribution,"

    A shame to muddy a laudible effort such as BSD drivers with a couple of dumb (lazy?) errors. I can appreciate that much of the info may be common to both, but to explicitly ignore the fundamental differences is a bit of a shame.

    --
    Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
    1. Re:FreeBSD != Linux by be-fan · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Look, FreeBSD support isn't a huge deal at NVIDIA. It's a few coders in their driver development group that are doing this with company approval. No doubt, these pages didn't go through the official "gods of marketing" over at NVIDIA. As such, give it a little time. What most likely happened was that they were pressed for time in releasing these drivers, and so they just made some hastly pages to put it up. What matters is the actual code, and once that's working nicely, I'm sure the page will get polished.

      --
      A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
  2. Can I take one 2 Go? by jpmahala · · Score: 3, Insightful

    From their site:

    NOTE: GeForce2 Go and GeForce4 Go mobile processors are not supported in this driver. Please contact the notebook's manufacturer for graphics drivers for your notebook PC.

    Sucks for my Dell Inspiron 8100. Anyone know if there is any way to set up drivers for the GeForce2Go?

  3. Re:Source code... nVidia... by Darren+Winsper · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not exactly. Their kernel module contains a very large binary and some code to act as an interface between the kernel and the big binary file. This allows them to keep the source closed while allowing people to compile it for newer kernels as they come out.

  4. Why have Nvidia done this? by jregel · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Although it's nice to think that Nvidia are porting their drivers to FreeBSD because they are keen on supporting open solutions, the number of users is [relatively] tiny, and I don't find it particularly convincing.

    What is more interesting is the possibility that Nvidia are contracted to develop drivers for a company that is developing a product that will run a BSD variant. What better way for Nvidia to test their new drivers than allow a public beta.

    Pure speculation though, we'll have to wait to see whether anything comes of this.

    1. Re:Why have Nvidia done this? by be-fan · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The reason seems to be the FreeBSD-NVIDIA project. They did some driver porting, and were really hitting the wall, so their contacts at NVIDIA decided to just do a release. It's not that hard at all to port the NVIDIA driver to another OS. The X11 part is OS independent (like all X11 graphics drivers) and the kernel part is wrapped in a small portability layer. Most likely, they're just doing it because the effort in porting is small compared to the good faith it gets in the community, and the fact that it allows vendors using a BSD to also consider NVIDIA products.

      --
      A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
  5. Re:Why by daoine_sidhe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I have been a linux user for 3 years, and I decided to try FreeBSD 4.7. I found it much quicker and more stable; kernel compilation was ridiculously easy and fast, and accelerated opengl was one of my only issues with it. That has been taken care of now, so I can honestly say that my impression of FreeBSD is a _very_ good one. I don't hate linux; I still run Gentoo. I'm just tired of bloated, unstable distributions, and the only ones that have approached the performance and stability I've seen in FreeBSD are Gentoo and Debian. Now, I'm sure there are probably others; I just haven't had the pleasure of using them as of yet. So, in conclusion, as a FreeBSD user I do not hate linux, but as a linux user I'm beginning to become frustrated with the state of distributions. Does that answer the question?

  6. Linux drivers... by dubious9 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    While I'm glad that Nvidia is broadening their base, I can't wonder if more people wouldn't benefit from new drivers for the new releases from Red Hat and Mandrake.

    I know the rpms don't work for either (8.2 under Mandrake 9.0 and 7.3 under RedHat 8.0) so as far as I can tell, you need to compile the source to get the driver working.

    This however requires configured kernel source and if you don't have that for your current kernel i.e. you never installed the src rpm, you'll have to install, configure, compile the kernel, then compile the NVidia drivers then edit the XF86Config file to change the driver string!

    Come on Nvidia, can't we have an automated driver? Please? Pretty please?

    --
    Why, o why must the sky fall when I've learned to fly?
  7. Common guys by linux_warp · · Score: 3, Insightful

    For years we have been bitching about not having nvidia drivers for freebsd, and now that they have made substantial progress and released a alpha/beta all we can do is bitch that they are unfinished? Lets give them a hand, they are making progress and obviously care about their customers.

  8. NetBSD by hubertf · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'd like to see this (at least) for NetBSD too, and maybe not only for PCs.

    => Open-Source these drivers, please!

    - Hubert