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LKM NVidia Drivers Now Available For NetBSD

Posted by timothy on from the pop-in-pop-out dept.

Dan writes "Quentin Garnier has made a loadable kernel module (LKM) version of the NVidia drivers on NetBSD. This release is very preliminary, rough and mostly meant to test the installation procedure. You will need a NetBSD-current system but the downloadable drivers code itself should be quite backward compatible with some caveats. For example, you need 'options KVM86' in your kernel config. His NVidia drivers on NetBSD page indicates that known working hardware includes RIVA TNT2 Model 64 (PCI), GeForce2 MX/MX 400, Vanta(AGP) and more!"

3 of 35 comments (clear)

  1. The answer is DRI! by motown · · Score: 5, Informative

    As I already pointed out in this post, it would be a lot easier for both NVIDIA and others if NVIDIA just based its driver model on DRI.

    --
    "Oooh, does that mean we get to kick some puffy white mad zionist butt?"
    1. Re:The answer is DRI! by ctr2sprt · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Probably so, but back when NVIDIA first released their drivers it really was reasonable to stay away from DRI, do their own implementation of AGP, etc. Now I suspect a lot of it is inertia: if they wanted to rewrite their drivers to use DRI, they'd probably have to start nearly from scratch. This would take a long time, and the end result would likely be worse than what we have now (at first, anyway), so nobody would use it.

      I'm not saying you're wrong. I think this is the direction NVIDIA needs to take in the future, and I expect they will take it (eventually). But it's not something that can be done in even a couple weeks.

      (Actually, I am kind of hoping that this is the reason behind the delay in FreeBSD drivers: the *BSD and Linux teams are trying to work on a much more portable driver, which might well mean DRI. Of course, there are lots of other things to worry about in the FreeBSD drivers since nearly all OpenGL games are going to be run in the Linux emulator, so maybe it's not that simple after all.)

  2. What about OpenBSD by motown · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I checked this guy's site, and it appears he really did some impressive work hacking around those binary FreeBSD drivers and somehow getting them to work with NetBSD (even though there are currently some serious issues left, but it looks like he already completed the hard part of the work).

    With this feat, I wonder if a similar hack could now also be made for OpenBSD... Although probably nobody would be interested in this. I mean, come on: why modify an otherwise stable and highly secure (mostly server) OS through the use of experimental patches, combined with binary code originally meant for another OS, which would only be beneficial to 3d graphics support? ;) But still I'm wondering, purely from a theoretical and technical point of view, how much more difficult it would be. Not much, I reckon, since the BSD's (especially NetBSD and OpenBSD) are very closely related and therefore share a lot of code and architecture.

    I guess that the next (sufficiently interesting) step would be Darwin (the x86-port ofcourse). Since Darwin is more distantly related from the BSD family than the rest of the BSD's (it's based on a FreeBSD-like layer on top of a microkernel), this might prove to be more of a challenge. :)

    Aaaargh! So many operating systems to potentially support! Do you see now why I am such a proponent of DRI? ;)

    --
    "Oooh, does that mean we get to kick some puffy white mad zionist butt?"