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New FreeBSD NVIDIA Drivers Available
CoolVibe writes "Finally, the officieal Nvidia drivers for FreeBSD have been updated to version 4365. The drivers are available at Nvidia's website. They are not in the ports yet, but that won't take very long. Also, this driver supports both STABLE and CURRENT officially. I am using them at the moment, and boy, these fix many problems I had with the older ones."
These drivers are a major improvement, no more do I have to hit ctrl-alt-backspace when they misload (or whatever it is they did before). No fiddling, just went through the basic install procedure and well - I am much happier :)
My playlist and add file screens on XINE are still messed up though (very hard to read) I don't even know if it gfx card related - any thoughts?
Saying your OS is the best because more people use it is like saying MacDonalds make the best food
Since you obviously don't like the closed-source driver, you should use xfree's "nv" driver -- You should do that anyhow, they are SOOOO great.
This is much better. The first one recommended that I recompile the kernel, and X with no optimizations, but I tried it anyway and it didn't work as expected, but this one seems to work okay (a few bugs, but no show stoppers) even with these optimizations in make.conf on -stable:
The install was pretty painless, too.
# make clean sig
When you use X on your local host, it doesn't really use the network stack. Read up on pipes and domain sockets before you spout off like that. You can still use X without having network support in your kernel. You only need sockets Ergo, nothing moves across any network. So all your points are basically uninformed drivel.
Domain sockets (like the ones X uses locally) are a very efficient way to do IPC. Every write() on a domain socket in in practice a memcpy/memmove operation. So the overhead is really really small. And you get network transparancy basically for free. It has _no_ impact whatsoever on what you do locally.
If you want to point the blame at the "slowness" of X, blame the toolkits. GTK is slow. Motif is slow. Qt is slow. Xlib is VERY fast, but cumbersome to use.
Just a personal experience. I grabbed this about 2 days ago and my -STABLE system crashed several times when I used the FreeBSD agp kernel module. I've changed over to use the builtin AGP support and everything has been rock-solid.
Except the Linux compatibility layer will be illegal thanks to SCO :(
Well it would be if there were any real Linux kernel source code in the layer, but there is not. It's mostly a simple translation between Linux system calls and BSD system calls. Thats why the Linux compat module is NOT GPL'ed...
BWP
cvsup, portupgrade and it is working like charm.