Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

New FreeBSD NVIDIA Drivers Available

Posted by timothy on from the oh-4365-at-last dept.

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."

11 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. FreeBSD Drivers...sigh. by eviltypeguy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Wish I could be more excited but I dumped my NVidia card a month or so ago.

    I am glad to see this though, the old NVidia FreeBSD drivers were pretty horrid.

    To ATi I would say:
    "Where are my finished Linux drivers, and FreeBSD drivers ATi? ARE YOU LISTENING?"

    Seriously. Their Win32 drivers are pretty decent, but their Linux drivers need some serious performance and OpenGL work done.

    In their infinite wisdom, they do not provide FreeBSD drivers, nor the information to commercial companies that want to write drivers for their 9600/9700/9800 series of cards.

    It's sad really. This almost makes me wish I had kept my NVidia card...

    1. Re:FreeBSD Drivers...sigh. by shane_rimmer · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I hate to say it, but that is precisely why I use Nvidia based cards in my computers. Their hardware may not be the best, and they won't open the specs for the cards, but at least I can get full functionality out of my video card under FreeBSD and Linux.

      If ATI ever supports non-MS operating systems the same way or better than Nvidia, I may consider purchasing one of their cards.

    2. Re:FreeBSD Drivers...sigh. by eviltypeguy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Sadly, it doesn't "work fine". ATi is refusing to provide any 3D hardware specific information for the 9600 / 9700 / 9800 series of cards to commercial driver developres or to the XFree project. What little is known about them has been reversed engineer from their binary drivers. Only 2D support information will eventually be provided.

      ATi is of the opinion that there are too many trade secrets for them to divulge the 3d hardware programming information, they also believe that open source programmers are not competent enough to write drivers for "such advanced programmable hardware".

  2. Re:FUCK NVIDIA by Decibel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How does 'never had anythingto do with the GPL' make them suck? They're releasing drivers for a GPL and BSD-licensed OS, that's not good enough for you?

    Sorry, I guess you're one of those people who will never be happy until no one anywhere can make any money off of any software or anything related to software. Nevermind.

  3. hoorah by thanjee · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This is good news.

    About every second time I reboot my computer the xdm login screen is all messed up. I have to hit ctlr-alt-backspace to reinit x, so that the drivers kick in properly. If I don't it locks up the computer during the login sequence. It is the same for both my 4.8 and 5.0 machine.

    I am currently downloading the new drivers :)

    --
    Saying your OS is the best because more people use it is like saying MacDonalds make the best food
    1. Re:hoorah by thanjee · · Score: 3, Informative

      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
  4. much better by lambsonic · · Score: 3, Informative

    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:

    XFREE86_VERSION=4
    CPUTYPE=i686
    CFLAGS= -O2 -pipe -mcpu=i686 -march=i686 -fexpensive-optimizations
    CXXFLAGS+= -O2 -mcpu=i686 -march=i686 -fmemoize-lookups -fsave-memoized -fexpensive-optimizations -funroll-loops

    The install was pretty painless, too.

    --
    # make clean sig
    1. Re:much better by CoolVibe · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Yup. These solve many problems I've had with the driver overwriting the %gs register in multithreaded OpenGL apps. It made apps SIGSEGV on exit. KDE (well, actually Qt) was very much affected, and one of the "fixes" was compiling Qt WITHOUT OpenGL support.

      The SIGSEGV "crashes" are totally gone, and these drives drive my GeForce 4 MX much (yeah, I know, cheap card) faster too. Tuxracer really runs very smooth! :)

      Anyway, these run mighty nice on my 5.1-RELEASE system. People that claim that BSD is dead plain don't know what they are blabbing about.

  5. Re:Why is this happening? by CoolVibe · · Score: 4, Informative
    Troll, but I'll bite.

    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.

  6. Re:I wonder... by gomerbud · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Check out the third party drivers section at the bottom of this page.

    http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/darwin/6. 0/release.html

    It seems that Apple has a similar situation with its NVidia and ATI drivers. They are only provided as binaries due to licencing restrictions.

    --
    Kan jeg få en pils, vær så snill?
  7. BSD IS NOT DYING! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    How can BSD be dying when it has a mascot [freebsd.org] like this?! Linux needs to get its act together if it's going to compete with the kind of hot chicks and gorgeous babes that BSD has to offer!

    You just can't take Linux seriously when its fronted by losers like these. You Linux groupies need to find some sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl ! Doesn't she [madchat.org] make you hard? I know this little hottie floats my boat! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox . As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little cock teaser . Even this old bearded Unix guru is apparently unable to take his eyes off her !

    With sexy chicks [spilth.org] like the lovely Ceren you will have people queuing up to buy open source products. Look! This guy can't get in there fast enough with her [kurtspace.com] in the doorway! Come on, you must admit she [kurtspace.com] is better than an overweight penguin! Don't you wish you could get one of these [drexel.edu]? Join the campaign for more cute [madchat.org] open source babes [madchat.org] today!