Slashdot Mirror
nForce2 GART Driver Finally Released For Linux
Rejoice, Radeon owners! For those of you who bought an nForce2 motherboard with the hopes of doing a bit of linux gaming on it, I'm sure it was a pretty hard let down to find out there was no AGPGART driver for the nForce2 -- until now. nVidia has finally released a kernel patch for the 2.4.20 release that is now providing GART support. Perhaps this means that nVidia is re-thinking their closed source-isms in favor of a more open policy in the future. A note on AGP 3.0: Note that AGP 8x mode is not available in 2.4.xx series kernels. If you find that X will not start, try disabling 8X mode in your BIOS. AGP3.0 has been implemented in the 2.5 series.
because it is not possible to run a radeon card in DRI-Mode on an nForce(2) Motherboard
Because, before this patch, under linux you could only run an Nvidia based AGP card... Nvidia (used to) only supply an NVAGP module that would not work with ATI products...
/. no-no) but they are better performance-wise than the open-source ATI DRI drivers...
Essentially this meant that if you ran linux under nforce you were stuck to an all Nvidia lineup...
The only hiccup is that IMHO Nvidia has better drivers under Linux than ATI... true, Nvidia's are closed source ( a
_CMK
Bad spellers of the world untie!
Linux's lack of Token Ring support and the fact that we were unable to defrag its ext2 file system
Information on token ring support for linux is available at www.linuxtr.net
As far as I know ext2 does not really need to be defragmented as performance is not affected as much as it is on fat*/ntfs. Also there are ways to defrag it.
So you can imagine our suprise when we were informed by a lawyer that we would be required to publish our source code for others to use.
You switched to Linux without reading the copyright? Not to mention that you only need to release the source code if you modify existing gpl'ed projects.
I think the biggest thing keeping Linux from being truly competitive with Microsoft is this GPL...
Now you're just trolling, this is offtopic anyway. The only reason Linux has become successful is because many people add to it...
Radeon owners? Well, that sounds a little bit misleading and should be differently worded, but certainly the nforce2 chipset has features that are not video specific and can be attractive to Radeon users.
:)
The nforce2 uses a 128 bit memory architecture that benefits the system's memory bandwidth as a whole. The GART helps here because you can now combine this architecture with a separate AGP video card, neglecting the relatively lower-end video core inside the nforce2.
GART is an AGP bridge feature, not a Video Chip feature, and the nforce2 is the best AMD compatible chipset out there, combine that with the current best Video chipset out there, which right now happens to be a Radeon, and there you have it, Radeon owners like myself rejoicing
- Otaku no naka no otaku, otaking da!!!
I have an nForce board and have been waiting for this for a while. I don't like having to use nVidia's built-in AGP support. However, many people with an nForce board have probably been using this patch for a while. It's been in the -ac patch in the kernel for a few weeks now, and the patch has been floating around a little longer than that. You can most likely expect it to be in kernel 2.4.22.
Second, some people seem to misunderstand the significance of this. nVidia's driver has built-in AGP support already, you don't need GART for AGP to work. This is only true, though, if you own a card that is made by nVidia. Radeon owners prior to now had to use the PCI bus for graphics if they had an nForce or nForce2 chipset.
You either have no knowledge on Free Software licenses, hire incompetent lawyers, or are deliberately trying to spread FUD (I can assure the latter will not work on /.)
(1) The "GPL compatible licensed" terms only applies to _distributed_ work. If your organiztion really are doing internal only work, you do not have any obligations to make available your source or binaries.
(2) Compiling code with GCC does NOT make your code automatically GPLed (how/where did you dig up lawyers like that?)
That's not the driver it's recompiling. It's recompiling a wrapper layer around the driver that interfaces between it and the kernel.
The actual driver is completely closed-source. It may work with multiple kernels as long as the wrapper compiles, but there's no guarantee of that and it still can't be debugged or audited for security or anything.
Because they was no way to use the AGP port without using the binary Nvidia drivers.. which was ok if you happened to have a nvidia graphics card in your nforce motherboard, but if you were running a ATI, or matrox card you couldn't load the AGP driver :-(
It was one of the reasons I purchased a ti4200 to drop in my nforce1(415-D - no inbuilt graphics card) (and now nforce2) motherboard.
I assume you were using the IGP.. as this would have allowed the nvidia drivers to load.
"Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to its source code released. This was simply unacceptable."
This is simply untrue. Many non-free systems are compiled using GCC. Many propreitary systems are built using the Gnu Compiler Collection, and I have never heard of the Free Software Foundation claiming that they must release their code. I think this is either a misinterpretation by your lawyers or general just fear, uncertainty, and doubt on behalf of your company.
"I think the biggest thing keeping Linux from being truly competitive with Microsoft is this GPL. Its draconian requirements virtually guarentee that no business will ever be able to use it."
The GPL is hardly more draconian than the Microsoft EULA. Furthermore, the GPL is clearly not about companies. The GPL is about giving freedom to the user.
"Everyone was very pleased with Linux, and we were considering using it for a great deal of future internal projects."
Your comment significes the overwhelming sensibility of sharing code. All the public resources that have gone into creating the myriad of propreitary products is generallyh wasteful. Their is no point in trying to re-invent the wheel. Their is no point in not sharing generally useful technical information.
I personally admire what your company did in contracting to modify Free software for specialized purposes. This is exactly how Free Software would benefit to our economy, especially for developers such as yourself. The only reason that things like Microsoft EULA's exist is so that someone can take away the freedom of their users and exhibit a system of power over them as people. The arguement that companies must protect their intellectual property is flawed because the money that they make generally doesn't go into paying for the costs of distrobution. It goes into things like making Bill Gates a very rich man. That's a system not at all concerned with compensating the developers, once you make an analysis and really think about it.
First you need to compile it against 2.4.20. The agpgart patch (as written) will not patch 2.4.21. If you manually apply it, the compile will fail. If you remove the line 'agp_bridge.num_of_masks = 1' from the diff, it will compile, but DRI still wouldn't work for me.
Unpack 2.4.20, apply the agpgart patch, compile, boot. Now 'make clean' in each individual directory in the nforce driver dir, make clean at top level leaves object files lying around. Then make,install. All should be good. ~6000fps in glxgears.
Don't bother applying the ac patches against 2.4.20 to get native nforce IDE support, this will break the DRI. Instead put 'hdparm -c1 -d1 -u1 /dev/hda' in your startup somewhere. The end result is the same.
I'm finally happy on the bleeding edge. I didn't have to set 4x AGP, but others have to.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
They could handle this like Matrox did with their G-series of cards on Linux. Matrox put all the stuff that they couldn't legally free in a library (mga_HALlib.so), which the driver (which is free software itself) can call. Interestingly, the driver can run without the HALlib being present, but the graphics card loses some of its features in that case.
That seems to me like the way to go for companies who want to embrace free software, but aren't legally allowed to release all their code.
Six sick