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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
I believe nVidia's 'closed source'ism is due to the fact that their drivers for their video cards include code that is not theirs, and licensed from other companies, and thus not publishable... Thus, I can't really see this as a shift to a more open source view.
I think it's amazing how hardware vendors continuously become more engaged in writing linux drivers. When I think back a couple of years, I could not buy the graphics card I wanted because I was not sure if it would ever be supported...
Homepage
Thank you Nvidia. Other than a having a girlfriend, you have given me most of my dignity back.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
I spent all last week playing Enemy Territory on Gentoo Linux with my NForce2 motherboard. I get similar framerates to the Windows version of the same game. Why exactly is this patch special?
I wonder. Would this kernel patch be any
help to the xbox-linux development to get
a better understanding of the nForce2 chip?
Maybe xbox-linux will have accelerated 3d in
the future?
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
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!!!
In the past, only NVIDIA cards could be used on nForce2 mobos due to the fact that you could only get a nForce2 AGP-GART driver packaged with the NVIDIA linux video drivers. The fact that the GART driver has been seperated from the video drivers means ATI Radeon and other cards can now work with nForce2 chipsets under linux.
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.
The New nvidia graphics installer (4369) comes with a new installer that will either d/l the appropriate pre-compilled driver, OR d/l the sources and compile a driver for you... all you need is the kernel-source installed for your current kernel...
Well, atleast this is true for most kernels... I am sure when you get far enough out into the 2.5.XX range there are significant enough canges to break the driver... but if you are willing to stay with a "stable" kernel you will be fine. And really, why game on an unstable kernel?
But, if you want to take the political stance, that is your right (assuming you live in a free country), but I would ask that you send Nvidia's top Brass an email stating why you would not purchase a Nvidia card... I ask this b/c to the sales dept, all they see is a lost sale, not one that could be captured from increased efforts in the linux community.
_CMK
Bad spellers of the world untie!
lmao...damn, I had one mod point left to mod you down and someone beat me to it...hey, ya reckon you work for microsoft??? oh man, this is the funniest thing I've ever read...do you really think that a bit of FUD like above is going to make everyone suddenly go.."oh yeah, he's right...better stop using linux"...dude, give us a little more credit than that!
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?)
The new nVidia installer will first try to locate a binary for your system, and if that fails it will recompile the kernel interface part of the driver. I'm using the driver with the new 2.4.21 kernel, even if nVidia does not "officially" support this version. I've seen it working on a 2.5.x kernel too (though I think it was a bit trickier than just running the installer).
> 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.
your lawyer (if any) lie
More useful (no kernel recompilation required) is that a gentleman named Robbie Ward has applied NVidia's AGPGART patch to the Radeon kernel module builder, and the result can be found at here.
You can find a small HOWTO on getting the lot going at the Waikato Linux Users' Group wiki, at http://www.wlug.org.nz/RadeonOnNforce. Have a look around while you're there, its an excellent source of information and we'd really love you to add to it.
Come on! I need just one more fix... just one fix!
BOO! TERRO
> we were unable to defrag its ext2 file system
I had never the need to defrag an ext2 or ext3 file system, anyway you should be able, there are tools to do it, for instance
$ apt-cache search defrag | grep ext2
defrag - ext2, minix and xiafs filesystem defragmenter
you modify the kernel and you don't know how to search on google?
you are a FUD maker, and your surname is either sco or gates
"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.
"I can handle bad speeling and double"
Marcel...what were you smoking?
It's not really a Slashdot nono. You don't get any help from kernel developers, period, if you experience problems on a system where any closed-source drivers have ever been loaded during the current power cycle. And for good reason; you can't really analyze the code to see if it's, say, smashing stack, or scribbling on the page cache, if you don't have the source. Since you can't rule out the closed-source elements because of this, it's harder to properly isolate the cause of, say, an oops; also, people like Alan have better things to do than narrow the cause of an oops down to code they can't debug.
And I will continue to buy them, whether they release source code or not.
You have exactly 314 seconds to come up with a less retarded plot.
Case in point - drivers for the Radeon series have been in the kernel tree (DRI rendering) for years and yet no one has done anything with them, ATI now provide their own set for linux in the same way as NVIDIA.
Further when 3dfx were still around the specifications where avilable and yet the community failed to show any interest in creating their own.
I think that open source is great and all but it is not some magic cure-all for world hunger. Propriety software does have a place and I just think this is one of them,
BTW,,, I don't think your need to have a stock kernel just to use the driver, I compiled and was able to run the module on my machine with out too much drama. All you have to do is make sure you have module support, in the place.
DFE-530TX? You want the ``via-rhine'' module.
It seems this guy has pasted this piece of crap before: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=67877&cid=6220 788
Founder of Mirror Moon - Tsukihime Game Trans
If you were going to use the software only internally, and not make any money selling it, why would it be a problem to release it for free to all your competitors?
I couldn't see that option when configuring the 2.5 kernel, I'm using via-rhine for 2.4.20-r2 (Gentoo) now.
Founder of Mirror Moon - Tsukihime Game Trans
I've just extracted the 1.0-4363 .run file from the NVidia site, and it appears that although the file does come with a few builds of the kernel module for stock kernels, there is also source which can be used to build against whatever you happen to have installed.
:)
And it does work, 'cos I just did 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
Um... the downloadable driver installer will actually compile a kernel module up for you if you aren't running a kernel that it already has a module for!!
Installed their driver on RH9 with the latest Red Hat kernel and it didn't have a prebuilt module for it.. so it downloaded some source and built one.
The Nvidia driver has consistently worked really well for me btw, across multiple systems that I have used it on.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
Some of us are doing 'serious' 3D work. The combo of linux and OTS hardware is very powerful. Medical imaging, GIS, CAD, etc. It doesn't hurt that you can stick in the Gentoo UT2003 boot disk after work, either.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
I'm not buying an ATI card until there are better driver supports (don't care if the drivers aren't open source) because I want to play Linux native games with excellent FPS.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
ATI's driver includes its own tweaked version of agpgart which fully supports AGP 3.0 and 8x - I've patched it myself and it works beautifully. I assume Robbie Ward's driver does the same. I'm getting around 7000 FPS in glxgears and around 1100 in fgl_glxgears. The advantage of patching ATI's driver is that you don't have to patch and recompile the kernel each time you make a change to it
I've been a longtime nvidia fan, but after the 3dMark fiasco (aplication specific optimization my ass), and then this, I'll be spending my $$ elsewhere. You reading this nvidia???
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Kidding, kidding. :P
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
A good place for an overview for 2.4>2.5 is http://www.codemonkey.org.uk/post-halloween-2.5.tx t
You don't need to defrag ext2 but you can get a defragger from http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/filesystem s/defrag-0.70.tar.gz
I make no statement about its relability
rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Um... they exist for exactly this reason... to reduce the scores on posts that have been moderated up when they really shouldn't have been... If you think some people are abusing this, then metamoderate.
I think that this was probably actually a rather fair time to moderate down, since it really wasn't an incredibly interesting post... Hell, it wasn't even correct about having to use stock distro kernels.
2.1.2 Linux Exception. Notwithstanding the foregoing terms of Section 2.1.1, SOFTWARE designed exclusively for use on the Linux operating system may be copied and redistributed, provided that the binary files thereof are not modified in any way (except for unzipping of compressed files).
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
As far as upgrading to 2.5 goes, I can't point you to any hard and fast guide, but I can give a few pointers and gotchas I've run across. First is that you're going to need a new modutils. The old one has died, a memorial service is planned. As far as any truly hard and fast rules go, I can't give many. Lowlatency is very nice on the desktop, acl support is now in the stock kernel, as is greater security options in general. The moving around of options got me too; my first attempt at building a kernel resulted in me building unix socket support as a module, which was bad, but was repairable. Also, encrypted loopback filesystems don't currently work, so if you need them, stick with 2.4. All in all, though, 2.5 kicks the llama's ass with much enthusiasm, and I'm looking forward to 2.6, as it looks to provide awesome performance and some great features that are hard to find in other OS's offerings.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
I believe nVidia's 'closed source'ism is due to the fact that their drivers for their video cards include code that is not theirs, and licensed from other companies, and thus not publishable...
If that was the reason then they could at least releast the specs for their chipset (the hardware interface, not the hardware's sourcecode).
I recently bought a MSI K7N2G-L motherboard, and saying that I was disappointed with nVidia when I discovered that the nForce2 chipset wasn't properly supported for Linux, is an understatement.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Now if only they could release the source for the nvnet Ethernet drivers...
Or at least release enough docs so that open source drivers could be implemented; I'm running 2.5.x, and had to use an additional network card because the (crappy)binary drivers from nvidia only support ancient kernels, not to mention there is no support for *BSD or other OSes.
Better audio support would be nice too... ALSA handles it, but in a very dumbed down mode, with many features not supported because nvidia doesn't want to release the docs, and AFAIK there is not even binary drivers for that...
But the network drivers are the biggest pain, in my company we have >20 Linux desktops, and is a PIA to have to install manually the drivers in each box, and pray that the kernel you are using is supported.
Keep in mind that even if the nvidia binary graphics drivers are quite good, the nforce drivers are _crap_ and haven't been updated since November last year, there are various bugs that nvidia said would be fixed in the next release, but so far the users are stuck.
Oh, well, I guess that I(and my company) will buy VIA based boards from now on... *sigh*
Best wishes
\\Uriel
P.S.: Don't forget to sign the petition, maybe nvidia gets a clue when they realize how many of their customers they are pissing off:
http://petitiononline.com/nforce2/petition.html
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
I use Linux as my home desktop. Recent RH distros are fine on the desktop - I have my Dad (who is not exactly computer literate) using the Linux desktop quite happily. A benefit of this is he can't run arbitary Windows .EXE files. We don't need the features of MS Office, Open Office does fine and we don't have to spend money on something we don't need. Kmail works fine for mail. xmms works fine for MP3s. Xine works fine for many different video formats. Linux drives my HP inkjet printer fine. I agree that MS Office and Outlook are a bit more polished, but it's an awful lot of money to pay for just a bit more polished. OO and KDE do everything we need without the high cost. If we used Microsoft software at home for what we're doing, the licensing costs would be more expensive than the (reasonably well specced) hardware it is running on.
I do have a Windows partition, but I'd rather not dual boot if I don't have to as it wastes time. The games I like to play (at the moment, RTCW and UT) run natively and run well under Linux, so why dual boot when I can play the games I want without dual booting?
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
... What are you going to buy? I don't see ATI releasing the 3d/tvout specs for radeon cards, either.
For 2d stuff, you do not need the nvidia driver; You can get plenty good performance out of the native X driver for nvidia cards.
Which is all that you'll really get out of ATI's stuff, either.
In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy the awesome performance I get out of my nvidia card's tvout and the occaisional 3d performance when I use it.
get 0wned. irc.w30wnzj00.com
When was the last time you were able to metamod an "Overrated" moderation?
See the problem? See why the parent complained? "Overrated"s are used by people who want to punish a poster, but don't want to be held to account.
And would be a violation of ANY OSS license.
Karma whorin' since 1999
Apple releases software that is not kicensed under the GPL. I think I trust Apples lawyers more than some Slashdot troll's lawyers
Some things are more important than an animated rat
If people with Nforce/2 motherboards really wanted to use an ATI card under GNU/Linux, google would've found the GART kernel patch. The Linux Kernel guys have had a working patch for a while now. I am getting around 2000fps with an Force2 board and ATI Radeon 9000 AGP on a pc I set up a month ago.
NVidia have had a working NForce2 GART driver for some time, but refused to release it under now. Maybe I am wrong, but it kinda seems like NVidia wanted to delay so that people buy _their_ AGP cards - seeing that the NVidia drivers have built in support for the AGP port on NForce/2 boards?
What do I need great 3D performance for? Do you really use Linux for games? I use a Windows box for games, and for that there are perfectly good drivers for ATI.
And for 2D stuff, anything will work pretty well, so my refusal to buy nVidia becomes an economic protest.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Yeah, because that worked so well for ATI??? You can't get TV-out to work on any ATI cards, and TV-in is just barely functional, even after hours upon hours of getting the software to compile... 4 entirely different Linux distros, 3 different versions of avview, and 2 posts to the Gatos mailing list, and I have never been able to capture audio. That doesn't even mention that avview is a very weak piece of software, with a lot of limitations (1GB filesize max? That sucks), and it is essentially the only program that will work with ATI cards (theoretically, I actually never got it to work right).
Personally, I would go for the open source software rather than the closed source, however, no software is useful to me if it doesn't work, and that has been my experience with ATI. As for your die-hard aversion to binary drivers, I have to wonder why. In the world of Windows and Apples, ALL drivers are closed source... There is a reason for that; people would rather have a house than the blueprints for making a house.
The FreeBSD version of the NVidia drivers seems to be 90% source, and 10% binary, so it's likely you would be able to patch that if you ever needed to do so. In that way, it's not really any worse of a license than with D.J.B.'s software.
Sorry, but I don't follow your hard-line, and I don't really believe you do either... I bought my NVidia videocards knowing that they will work on Linux and FreeBSD, not so that they MIGHT work a few years in the future. They work right now, and nothing will stop them from working with the same software in the future. I'm not screwed if the Open Source driver developer decides not to fix a bug; so I'd much rather have a company that supports their hardware on my OS, rather than barely-working, open source drivers.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
This patch is released under the nvidia software licence. I guess that this makes it incompatible with the GPL. This is very bad. Far from all gamers compile their own kernel. They have to now in order to use this patch. Why didn't nvidia make this GPL so it could make it into the main linux source?
/Esben
"Nobody really checks their email any more. They just delete their spam"
Exactly my point. There's an open-source nvidia driver that comes with Xfree86 that works perfectly for everything you want to do. Boycotting nvidia over a driver is silly when it's a driver that even if it was open-source you wouldn't be taking advantage of any of it's features.
The nvidia closed source driver is only necessary if you want to use either 3d (which i don't care about either) or the very awesome twinview support (which i use every day).
get 0wned. irc.w30wnzj00.com
nVidia drivers really are a lot better here, but I'm sticking with ATI.
With this MB under Gentoo with a Radeon 8500 64MB and fireGL I get 2200FPS in glxgears, but the same configuration using an nVidia MX440 64MB I get 2600FPS. Using otherwise exactly the same setup. The XFree86-DRM DRI driver for the Radeon gave 1800 BTW.
Now under Windows XP with MadOnion 3DMark2001SE, the Radeon kills the MX440, although I can't remember the exact scores.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
I'm confused... the nForce driver wasn't released under GPL license, or was it? I mean the one from nVidia...
I strongly doubt that such considerations where made at nVidia. The Linux market is at this point very small. I think nVidia's Linux support is merely running at "low priority". In nice mode so to say... nevertheless, at least the company doesn't ignore us completely.
Got to admit, I was a Radeon 8500 user. With this issue at hand, I then purchased a cheap nVidia MX440. Now the issue is resolved, I'm back to my faster Radeon.
There is no doubt that they made money from this, although I'm not sure it would have been substancial. I won't be a sucker for nVidia again though (especially after the whole FutureMark issue).
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
In terms of performance ("faster"), it really depends quite heavily on several factors, including your hardware and the game itself. Wine(X) is a compatibility layer rather than an emulator, so corresponding Win32 API calls in the game are handled by the wine subsystems. I imagine generally this would be a little slower than the native win32 environment, since these routines are further 'backed' by the native environment (X11 etc). It's like adding an extra function call (at least) to each one the game makes. The faster your CPU is, the less impact these additional layers of execution are going to have.
Programming the hardware rendering pipeline is done via a DirectX-compatible layer (I guess not for OpenGL games?). If you have a high end video card (with drivers) and your Linux kernel is friendly with your north bridge, then rendering speeds are probably around about the same as in Windows.
So, final performance is really going to depend on where the bottleneck is. If the game is limited by your video acceleration hardware, then it's probably going to run about the same in Linux as in Windows, given your hardware has similar kernel and driver support in both. If the major bottleneck is with the CPU (e.g. a complex physics engine or large amounts of computation) then, based on my previous comments, it makes sense to expect the game to perform worse in the Linux environment.
I've played such things as UT, UT2003 in Linux 'natively' and I found the performance comparable to the same game running in Windows. Under WineX I've played around with RollerCoasterTycoon, Jagged Alliance 2, Fallout 2, Jedi Knight 2, and a few others. I found all of these games ran slower in Linux than in Windows. However, not a *lot* slower, just noticably slower. They were still technically playable.
Which brings me to an interesting point. By far, the most problems I've had with WineX haven't been due to graphics, sound, performance or even copy protection. The biggest problems I've had *by far* have been to do with my mouse. In RCT, the right mouse button refuses to work properly; in JA2, a single click ends up a double click (which is a lot more annoying than it might sound - especially with checkboxes!). Getting my Microsoft joystick working hasn't been fruitful (I don't even know for sure that it's possible). It's a bit of a disappointment to successfully install your favourite game with WineX, fire it up to see the wonderful and familiar graphics, hear the emotion-stirring music, only to discover you can't click on anything or the keyboard doesn't work.
WineX is an interesting project and one I hope continues to improve. However, it only takes me a minute or two to boot into Windows and fire up something for my 'fix'. At the end of the day, I'm not too bothered if I'm gaming in Windows or Linux, as long as I get to have some fun.
Some of the nForce drivers were GPL.
There was a patch you had to apply to a 2.4.20 kernel which was GPL'ed for nvagp support.
Other modules included in the nForce driver set include nvnet - a proprietary networking module. I didn't mention it because it's not relevant to the topic though.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
What a blatant troll. It contains several obvious falsehoods all designed to stir people up into a frothing mass. *sigh*
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I'm not on my Linux boxen right now, but there should be something like Networking Devices -> 10 / 100 Mbit -> Via Rhine. I KNOW it is under the 10/100Mbit section in something having to do with networking devices.
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
Not only is your comment off-topic, I've seen it before a few days ago. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Given the massive number of replys you got before, it's obvious to me that you know better about practically all statements you made.
Please don't post this here anymore. I will ignore you from this point on, and urge others to do the same.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
I dual boot XP and Gentoo. I keep both of them
very up to date. I LOVE quake3 arena railgun only
mods. You can't begin to compare the difference
between quake3 under linux and XP using nVidia
cards. I get higher fps, better pings, smoother
gameplay, and the mouse feels at least 5 times
better under Gentoo. That's just how it is.
I spent a week trying to tweak quake3 under XP
to get it to play better than it does on Gentoo
because I was CONVINCED it should play better on
XP. Well, it doesn't. Fixed the stuck at 60hz
issue. Still not as good. Installed Logitech
drivers instead of using default XP mouse
drivers. Still not as good. Hacked my registery
to tweak my mouse more. STILL feels like shit
compared to Gentoo. Now take all that information
and understand it applies to UT2003 also from
my experience. Quake3 and UT2003 have such
vastly superior gameplay under Gentoo than they
do under XP, I honestly feel I have an unfair
advantage when I'm up against the win32 crowd.
The fact that I usually win the server with
a 100ms ping speaks volumes. I can't wait to
have the same unfair advantage with Doom3.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
Hmm, I just splashed out on the Asus KT400 A7V8X motherboard and a Hercules Radeon 9800 Pro.. as I thought that ATI were doing something with the Weather Channel to provide high quality open source drivers for their Radeon series?
I'm sure there was a Slashdot article on it a while back?
Am I mistaken, or was that just lies? Or will I beable to play Quake3 and Neverwinter Nights in Linux?
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
I wouldn't go so far as to rule out DRI drivers.
On my video card, a Radeon 8500, I can get about 1800FPS with them (glxgears). The proprietary ATI drivers aren't fast when compared to nVidia's, although they aren't that bad. Those give me 2200FPS under otherwise the same conditions.
The only catch: UT2003 won't work with the open DRI drivers. If you don't play that, then you'll probably do OK.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
Alright, NVIDIA's 3d-drivers are closed-source. But they do offer kick-ass performance under Linux.
Unfortunately, they have been jumping through all sorts of hoops in order to keep releasing closed source 3d driver binaries, while keeping them up to date with XFree86 and Linux kernel updates. This is unnecessary, since XFree86 already has an infrastructure in place, which is well suited to solve this problem: The Direct Rendering Infrastructure, or DRI.
In the past, NVIDIA's argument against DRI could have been that DRI wasn't a sufficiently mature technology, but nowadays, this is no longer an issue. Also, NVIDIA is the only company in the graphic card business, which used a different proprietary infrastructure for their 3d drivers. All the other companies, such as ATI, Matrox and Videologic (regardless if they release sources to their 3d-code or not) all use the DRI-model.
Currently, there DRI-model fits NVIDIA's predicament perfectly: NVIDIA has already released the sources to the 2d-part of their drivers long ago (and they have been part of XFree86 for quite some time), but they just want to keep the 3d-aspect closed source. That's exactly how DRI-based drivers work! A 2D-part, which is part of XFree86, combined with a 3d-part, which plugs into the 2D-part of the driver through a (standardized) modular architecture!
An added advantage is that these binary DRI modules are OS-independent, just architecture-dependent. It is even possible to use DRI modules with GUI systems other than XFree86. DirectFB has been (successfully) working on DRI-support.
In other words: had NVIDIA already switched to the DRI model for their driver, then they wouldn't have had to go through the trouble of porting their drivers to FreeBSD. The same binary module already available for Linux would have worked on a FreeBSD system with a DRI-enabled kernel (which FreeBSD already supports). The DRI modular architecture has been deliberately designed that way. All NVIDIA would have to do is release the 2D specs under open source (which they already have done) and compile DRI module releases once for each architecture they'd want to support: x86, Motorola/IBM G4, IA64 and AMD64 architectures. These modules would then work out of the box on any OS with DRI support (on any of these architectures).
Example: if Zeta, the BeOS "reincarnation", would be updated to work with DRI modules, then it would be able to make use of the 3d capabilities on NVIDIA-cards right away!
Furthermore, the DRI model would have made it a necessity vor NVIDIA to release open source AGPGART kernel code for the NForce2 in the first place, because this would be required for even NVIDIA's drivers to work. A proprietary alternative AGP handling hack (like what they have been using in their drivers until now) would have made no sense.
Lastly, the fact that NVIDIA would then not be using a different architecture then the other companies would be causing a lot less headaches for 3d application developers under Linux. Right now, many games and other applications under Linux, such as Winex 3.0 and the Neverwinter Nights port, have been optimised to work with NVIDIA's drivers, but still need work on proper support for DRI (basically covering all other 3d solutions for Linux).
If any NVIDIA driver engineer is currently reading this: please seriously consider switching your drivers to the DRI model! It would save both you and others a lot of work and potential compatibility problems, without having to release any 3d driver sources. This way, you would also instantly be expanding the number of operating systems able to support 3d on NVIDIA cards, without you having to do any additional work for it!
The only disadvantage for NVIDIA that I can think of is the status quo that NVIDIA would possibly like to uphold: games and other 3d applications having better support for NVIDIA (currently being the market leader on Linux) and all the DRI-using competitors remaining behind. In the longer term, how
"Oooh, does that mean we get to kick some puffy white mad zionist butt?"
Nforce1 & 2 in the PC arena are made for AMD CPU's. The XBox using an Intel P3 with an integrated Geforce3 Core. So this would be probably zero help for xbox-linux.
-- taking over the world, we are.
I just hooked up an nforce2 motherboard into my main desktop PC yesterday, I grabbed the gart patch, applied it, reinstalled the nvidia drivers for my geforce3 and rebooted. Everything came up fine, the agpgart stuff seemed to work fine and glxgears was faster than with my previous motherboard, but then everything completely locked up after the machine had been up for a few hours (I was playing tuxracer at the time).
DAMMIT!
I have had agp disabled on this PC for a couple of years now because every damn fricken time I enable it and set X drivers to use it, my PC starts suffering random crashes. That really pisses me off.
So I disabled the agpgart module and I'm now trying things out with the nVidia XFree86 driver's internal nforce gart support.
Also, I'm having some serious doubts about the performance of the system, changing workspaces takes so much longer than before (gnome2), yet my CPU is about 600mhz faster than the one I was running yesterday, the RAM is faster, ok the gfx card is still the same gf3ti500, but it should be more snappy, not much less snappy!
If anyone has a similar setup (XP2600, EPoX 8RDA nforce2 mobo, pc3200 memory, geforce 3 ti500), please post some Quake 3 benchmarks or something...I got about 180 when I ran demo001 on the default "High Quality" settings (so 800x600), 150 when I ran it at 1024x768 and about 100 at 1600x1200, which seems fairly respectable to me, but then I was only getting just under 3000fps from glxgears, whereas some people on nvnews.net's forums seemed to think 5000-10000 would be more normal.
Anyway, here's hoping for stability and speed!
Chris "Ng" Jones
cmsj@tenshu.net
www.tenshu.net
http://www.ati.com/support/drivers/linux/radeon-li nux.html?cboOS=LinuxXFree86&cboProducts=RADEON+900 0&eula=&choice=agree&cmdNext=Next
i think if the open source driver would be near the same quality if not better if the programmers had the same access to hardware and specifications as the guys writing drivers for ati or nvidia
i would like to see ati and nvidia to release their drivers open source or at least the parts they have the right to
they are hardware companys and i don't think it would hurt them more then it would help
just start thinking about drivers ported to every fcking OS you can think of
the community could help 'em to find and fix bugs
stop supporting microsoft with pirating their software!!!!!
They say Xfree 3 4.2 and not 4.3 which I run on RH 9 does anyone know if they'll work or is there another driver I'm not seeing on the website.
Bugger, ATI don't have drivers for XFree 4.3. Does anyone know what the one that comes with XFree86 is like?
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
ATI releases full specs for all their cards, and yet the open-spurce Radeon drivers (especially those for R300 cards) are not that good.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Has anyone had luck getting 8500-series working in X 4.3?
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
It's very good for 2D, and has no 3D support whatsoever on R300 cards. You're not going to be doing much Linux gaming with that driver.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I think they see supporting Linux as a good thing.
I have found their driver for the Geforce cards to be stable, I have never had a problem personally.
while I dont own an nForce2 board, I am happy that they released this driver. its another step in the right direction in my opinion.
They cant release the code to the Geforce driver because the code they utilise isnt their code, but I wonder: will they try to get around that?
There has to be a way around that issue. I forsee Nvidia releasing an open source driver one day.
to Nvidia: Thanks for giving me many years of stable gaming in Linux
GLXgears != benchmark. It takes advantage of no hardware features. Just pure pixel-pushing bandwidth.
-- Terry
Bah, UT2k3 runs even better on linux than it does on windows... plus it doesn't reboot my machine 20% of the time like the windows version does.
Maybe I lucked out in regards to my mouse choice.
I have a logitech mx300 that I took apart and
removed the internal metal weight from. For rails,
it's important to have the lightest mouse possible.
This disqualifies anything cordless. Starting with
the mx300, Logitech started using their 800dpi
technology optical sensors borrowed from their
then recent wireless optical mouseman line. So
you get the benefit of the higher resolution,
without the battery weight. As for the settings
in my mouse section of my XF86Config, they
look like this:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse1"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mouse0"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "SampleRate" "125"
EndSection
The only thing profound in there is the SampleRate
line. It may or may not even be making a
difference. I've always included it. All I know
is my mouse is a hell of a lot smoother under
linux. I use 125 because that's supposed to be
the maximum speed that USB communicates with
the mouse. Hope this helps.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
I currently have an NVidia card, and NVidia drivers, and it is the sole reason for crashes on my machine.
/sbin/lsmod|grep -i nv
:-P
The display will lock, and I have maybe 30 seconds to SSH in and shutdown the machine, or it is hosed.
Also look at this:
maze root #
NVdriver 1066304 10 (autoclean)
A 1 meg kernel module? That must be all the cool special case code they have for cheating in benchmarks?
Never mind the fact that I am purposely running an slightly older driver cos the new one seems less stable and screws up 2D in interesting ways.
Now if I got myself an nForce based system, I could have these problems with a bunch of other binary drivers too! Sound, MB, ethernet, and video!
Not.
I'll pass, and I am SOO buying an ATI card next time. I have really found out the hard way that binary only drivers suck.
---
Okay, so this brings to my mind a question about the miniITX boards by VIA. These are very small (170mm x 170mm) boards with basically everything included (video, sound, network, etc.), and are very low power (usually no active cooling, even for the CPU).
:(
Do these things work well with Linux (especially the embedded video, sound, & networking)?
I'm planning on building a little box later this year with one of these things, and I was planning on using Linux, little suspecting that the driver issue was still an issue in 2003 for things like this. Very disheartening.
Please tell me I won't have to use Windows on this system!
I mean they also cheat or "optimize" using drvers for certain benchmarks and games that in many cases reduce the image quality of the games (why i call it cheating) without informing the consumer or developers. I'm not singleing out nvidia here as i'm sure others do it too (ATI was also caught doing a minor cheat this year and some major ones a few years ago).
Wouldn't this be a major reason to hide/close your source.
Hmmm... Pie...
buying a Radeon, after how well nvidia's treated me as a linux user :).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Yea because people who buy consumer-level motherboards really buy a lot of ECC memory...
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
no...
Because people who need better than consumer level junk cannot buy quality motherboard chipsets for the athlon.
In other words, the AC was complaining about the lack of quality high end motherboard for athlon. Luckilly, with athlon 64, and Opteron, this will no longer be a problem, as the memory controller and hypertransport controller will be built onto the CPU die. This leaves only PCI/AGP bridges, and sound/video/ethernet/1394/IDE/etc. as the primary things 3rd parties will provide. This will eliminate the cause of AMD's piss poor reputation of unstable, low performing, low quality motherboard chipsets produced by shitty companies that have no quality control (VIA, ALi,SiS come to mind).
Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.
I've been looking at these for a car computer (for mp3/ogg playing, GPS navigation, etc) Most of it is supported. The VIA castlerock display drivers are in CVS versions of Xfree, and everything else was supported by existing drivers IIRC. The only unsupported part is the hardware MPEG2 decoder in the M-series boards. Unfortunately the CPUs aren't powerful enough to play back DVD resolution MPEG-2 in software so they are pretty useless as embedded DVD players.
0 1 - just my two bits
I don't know, the drivers for my R100-based card are pretty good. The R300 is a pretty new chip, and you certainly can't expect open-source volunteers to be as *fast* as closed-source developers who get paid for their work.
The reason an EULA is there is to protect the IP rights of the owner of the IP. These are hard things to protect without IP law. I get paid to develop software. Every time you pirate that software, it hurts me, or people like me. The money that my company loses means that I lose the opportunity to get a raise or a bonus or be promoted. I cannot physically prevent you from mass-redistributing that software. No such barrier is effective. The bits of data are trivially duplicatable and the medium to store them costs $1 per GB. This doesn't just affect the big companies.
Back in the 80's, my father's < 50 person company developed a compiler product and sold it for about $400. There was no copy protection devices in it. A few copies were sold in Europe. Several years later, we learned that it was a popular compiler in research labs in Europe. We didn't know the order of magnitude of copies that had been pirated, but my father could quite possibly retire today if the money had been legitimately paid to his company. My father's business was reasonably successful because they sold hardware as well (mainly Intel 80*87 and Weitek coprocessors). Today, they're downsizing because of the tech slump. We really could have used that cash to hire more developers and build better products.
My point here is that piracy doesn't just hurt big companies like Microsoft. Piracy hurts small development houses much, much worse.
Bill Gates is an incredably sharp businessman. Regardless of what it costs per byte to distribute software, it costs far more to develop, market, and sell that software. You pay people to run a company, manage employees, manage facilities, design, develop, and test the software, and so many other things.
Back in the day, all of these responsibilities were in the developer's hands. In large companies, these are done by teams. Those teams need direction, management, etc. You have to give people vacations and benefits, and you have to pay people to find and hire the people who you will stake your company's reputation on.
In short, software is NOT an easy business. I hate to break it to you, but one of the only markets where it's easy to be profitable in software is in large corporations/government organizations, where the demand for software is in the 1000s of employees per organization. Why? Because they need the bulk orders, the premium support, and they get the best prices but they can't afford the lawsuit if they pirate software.
Free software is nice and all, and it even has its market. But I love writing software, and that's what I get paid to do working for a software producing corporation. Bill Gates is the man who lived what most of us can only dream. Imagine what it must be like to have an army of software developers listening to your words. If I were in his shoes all I would be saying would be 'make it better, and make it more open'.
If the system wasn't concerned with compensating developers, then I wouldn't be thankful that I have a good paycheck. I work hard for my money. It's nice that people are willing to give away their software goods to the masses, but most of us have to put food on the table, too.
It's the same in the music industry. Computer Programmers are like recording artists. We create the goods which others consume. The goods are in the form of something which can be e
I have tried patching the ATI drivers, and it works fairly well, but does not take advantage of the NForce2's specific features over the NForece1. I am wondering if anyone managed to port the linux-2.4.20-agpgart.diff to the 2.4.21 kernel. If you know where an equivalent patch for the 2.4.21 kernel is, you should reply with the link!
From what I've heard, the Free 3D for the R200 is also significantly slower than the ATI binary driver, and the R200's been out for years. I think part of the problem is that 95% of the people with the know-how to write well-optimized drivers already work for ATI and nVidia.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
I'm neither from south america nor an idiot as you
Actually, I think there are serious differences between the DRI model and what NVIDIA's hardware dose. Recently, they even switched away from XAA to their own model because XAA apperently didn't mesh well with how their cards did mixed 2D/3D rendering.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I'm actually the original writer of this story, however at the time of writing, I hadn't made an accounbt on /. yet (I'm such a lurker. ;)
Anyway, I see from the comments people are having trouble with the GART driver (Getting DRI to work with a Radeon, etc.) So I will now post some more information.
My setup is:
I've tested this configuration both on Gentoo and Debian Sid.
The DRI drivers do indeed work, as you can see here:
cthulu root # glxinfo :0.0
:0 screen: 0
name of display:
display:
direct rendering: Yes
as well as here: :0.0 screen: 0
cthulu root # fglrxinfo
display:
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: Radeon 9700 Pro Athlon (3DNow!)
OpenGL version string: 1.3 (X4.3.0-2.9.12)
The fversion of FireGL drivers I am using are indeed 2.9.12 -- these are not currently available on ATI's website. This thread on transworld gaming's forums have links to tarballs for the FGLRX 2.9.12 drivers for both XF86 4.2 and 4.3. Dont mind that the thread actually says 2.9.8, the links are current.
Other than the updated drivers, I hadn't done anything special to get the GART driver and the R9700 to play nice together. However, it did take me 3 straight days of searching via google to figure out that the Kernel does not support AGP 3.0 in 2.4.x implementations, so the easiest workaround is to simply disable it in the bios as I mentioned in the story.
run fglrxconfig, generate your config file, restart X, you're good to go.
On another note, yes indeed -- if you read the new license carefully, the .diff file is released under the GPL. No, the net driver is not, nor do I believe the sound driver is either, but I may be mistaken. I really dont give a damn what liscense is used as long as my hardware works. :)
As for the patch to the radeon driver that supports AGP3.0, I'll have to check it out. Sounds interesting.
Oh, by the way:
cthulu root # glxgears
20234 frames in 5.0 seconds = 4046.800 FPS
23297 frames in 5.0 seconds = 4659.400 FPS
23300 frames in 5.0 seconds = 4660.000 FPS
23298 frames in 5.0 seconds = 4659.600 FPS
Hope this helps someone out there. :)
I don't think you really believe that someone who sells something should be able to dictate the terms under which that something is used by the purchaser, that's why I make this distinction.
You have chosen to work in an industry where the product is infinitely reproducible except for artificial restrictions placed upon it, which are imperfect and which are enforced by imperfect human beings. Deal with it, or start manufacturing truck tires or something. Don't try to control me after I have bought your software.
Wrong. Every time someone takes an illegal copy of software instead of making a purchase, it represents a loss of opportunity for people like you. It is not like "taking money out of your pockets", which implies you had the money in the first place. In addition, how do you know it hurts you? Maybe the nasty pirate who bootlegs a copy of your software when they couldn't afford the price was doing a mass evaluation of software for a purchasing contract. Or maybe they are a student who will bring their knowledge of your software with them when they land a career with a design firm, and ask the firm to standardize on your software.Bottom line is, you can generalize all you want about how pirates are bad and serve nothing but to ruin software businesses, but most software companies are doing fine in spite of rampant piracy, and may in fact be benefitting from it in these rough times where everyone is more watchful of where their dollars are being spent.
If you want to remove one more excuse for piracy, tell your retailers to accept opened returns of software. Nothing burns me more than buying a broken product and not being able to return it because I broke the seal.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
Methinks you are just trolling, but here's some food for thought...
The big difference is that ATI's specs are only released (under NDA) to a few open source developers (namely, Gatos), so you really don't have the option to fix anything even if you wanted to, unless you completely reverse-engineer the hardware.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
A FOSS ethernet driver would be bundled by Mandrake, thus enabling me to go on line OOTB through my ethernet-interfaced DSL modem to collect the proprietary video driver if I wanted accelerated 3D. Sound is (hawk, spit) Intel i810 (I'd be even more pleased if the next nForce was based on the Yamaha chips instead), and non-3D video is fine with the FOSS X driver.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I think MPlayer can do it. I don't have a VIA mobo but some people have reported it does work. On my P3-450, DVD resolution MPEG2 files play fine without hardware acceleration, and I expect the VIA procs to be at least as powerful.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.