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NVidia Releases Linux Drivers Supporting 4K Stacks
Supermathie writes "NVidia has finally released drivers for their chipsets and the 2.6 kernel that support 4K stacks. That means compatability with Fedora Core 2 kernels, people! View the README, visit their driver page, or download the package."
so finally nvidia got its act together.
i wonder what took them so long?
The real story is when they open the source to the drivers.
thisnukes4u.net
Ok... wtf is a 4k stack?
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
I will miss thee.
Now I can get my ass kicked in Enemy Territory under Fedora Core 2. I was missing that but for some reason, I got so much more work done. :)
sigs are like a box of chocolates, they all suck remove the underscores to email me
For me the best way to test these new drivers is to play Enemy Territory
One of the best online FPS games and it's free-as-in-beer.
Keep up the good work NVIDIA.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
I don't think any linux users have a 4k stack of bills.
What's this all about, for those of us who aren't nVidia or linux zealots.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
It seems that this driver's OpenGL headers are a little buggy, but the solution was given by NVIDIA employee in this thread at nvnews.net forum.
I've been testing these drivers under Fedora Core 2 for a while, and they appear to work flawlessly.
Thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Now I have to re-emerge yet another kernel. And I just got 2.6.7 the way I wanted, too.
Watch as I now get flamed and modded down...
I agree with you! Closed source software has its places, just as open source software does.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
For people who are building home theater PCs for things like MythTV, this is a major step forward. The last release that supported overscan (so that a TV image doesn't have black stripes on the sides) was many releases back (version 4363). This release not only supports Linux 2.6 with 4K stacks, but has overscan and interlace support, making it ideal for TV and HDTV display.
Are there any video card manufacturers left who release other than binary only drivers?
The OP is right...there is probably no big magic in their drivers.
It's a control issue...and their contining demand to control distribution of the drivers harms linux every day.
It's stupid and there is no "economic ramification"...the drivers are free, after all. They make their money selling cards!
...with the latest 2.6 kernels, simply turn off 4K stacks. But hey, now it's not necessary. Yay.
4k stacks are a good thing, a first step for Linux to support an insane amount of simultaneous processes on the system.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
You added nothing to the thread.
Other than you're just as much an anit-Linux zealot as any Linux zealot is.
Everything is a control issue. Companies want to control their product. Zealots want to control the companies. As a user (who happens to be running FC1 waiting on nvidia to do this...), I find the latter position far less defensible.
Economics is extremely complicated, and I assure you that it is more complicated than just the purchase price for a card at the store.
If you don't think losing trade secrets can change a business model for hardware, ask IBM about the early PCs and clones. They might have a slightly different perspective.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Kernel Stacks... Is a kernel option in "kernel hacking" (so its a trick it would seem). It allows for mroe process threads on your computer among other things. Before, it was 8 stacks. But, as many people noticed RedHat again fucked with the kernel, and enabled 4k instead of 8k in the default kernel in fedora core 2. The drivers then could not run in that mode it seemed, and a vanilla kernel was required. They fixed that, thanks nvidia, made support for the 6800 (now that the linux driver is realeased, im giving the company my 500 bucks...see...support linux...make money....) and upadated both the x86 and amd64 driver codebase to the same version, instead of 5536 to 5532, thanks nvidia, slowly but surely you do well enough. I found this out when I recently installed slackware 10, and a new vanilla 2.6.7 kernel. Slackware on a laptop, (ibm thinkpad a30) is good shit. Gnome looks very sexy, on it. I want Doom 3.
this is a cut/paste of this article. Unless you actually wrote it, don't copy with no reference.
I submitted this story last night, and it didn't get posted.
Wonder why this story was rejected when I mentioned it 4 days ago and then submitted the story.
I don't know about you guys, but I think having the source code to recompile it manually would help out immensely.
It's funny when you think about why hardware companies is they like to keep the source code secret (i.e. you only get the drivers). If they claim that someone may use it for some unfit purpose then the question is, if someone has the source code without the hardware isn't it inherently useless to them anyway? Seems to me you actually buy the source code when you get the hardware (especially for the newer $$$ components) -- they just don't want to fork it over because somehow you may "magically" make the component up yourself out of basement and not have to buy it.This has already been linked to above. Thanks for properly citing also.
>They might have a slightly different perspective.
Yes, the IBM PC XT was a complete POS that couldn't compete with anything else out at the time. Almost nobody used it, apart from a handful of people. That garbage computer didn't even include a decent sound system, for crying out loud!
Then the clones came.
And the XT architecture became popular.
And IBM sold more PCs than they ever thought possible.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
The "zealots" just want to control their own computers. That's what Open Source is about. If you have an nVidia video card in your linux system, and you want full functionality, you have to let nVidia control your computer.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'll karma whore, since I read the article linked above.
If you allocate memory in 8k stacks, the kernel's got to find 2 pages of memory together. Which I guess gets to be a pain as uptime increases. Since memory pages on most hardware are 4k, it's easy as pie with 4k stacks. Plus, you separate some of the kernel stuff like software interrupt handlers to their own stack (I think that's what it was), hopefully making the system more stable in the process.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Please tell me where you got your crystal ball. I'd be quite interested in getting one myself.
I'm curious to how you came to the conclusion that IBM wouldn't have improved their architecture without pressure from the clones. Sure, it would have been a slower improvement, but they very well could still have wound up with a significant market share.
I think I'll wait for this to be tested for more than 24 hours before I try my hand on it.
The greatest experience we can have is the mysterious.
- Albert Einstein
Companies want to control their product in order to control markets. 'Zealots' want to limit any one company's control of markets to keep them open, and it works. Are you really implying the world and the state of computer technology would both be better had IBM retained monopoly control of hardware? I'll wager most historians of technology will disagree.
Or go out and revise the nv drivers. Nothing (I would assume) prevents you from doing so. Nothing prevents you from getting a video card from another company. And by the same token, nothing should prevent NVidia from releasing closed-source drivers.
Besides, what would 99.9% of linux people do even if it was open source? Download source, not even look at it, type make install clean, and be done with it. (Or make setup or whatever the build sequence is; point being that most users wouldn't care.) And for the 0.1% of people who do mess with it, unless they discovered some great tweak that would provide a significant feature or speed advantage over the NVidia drivers, I'd just go with them, since I trust them more since the quality of their drivers partially determines their sales, and thus they have a bigger motivation to make them better.
Are you really implying the world and the state of computer technology would both be better had IBM retained monopoly control of hardware? I'll wager most historians of technology will disagree.
OTOH, I would argue that IBM would likely have a better market share and sell more products had they retained monopoly control.
IBM isn't concerned about the world and state of computer technology; IBM is concerned about $REVENUE - $COSTS.
Similarily, NVidia wants to make the most money it can, and it thinks closed source drivers will further that goal better than open source drivers. I agree with the grandparent that this is likely.
If you find fault with the above, I put to you that you are finding fault with the bedrock of capitalism. Which is, of course, fine, but you should consider voting for the communist or socialist parties come your next election.
I am a medic :)
*pokes you with a needle*
I did install the beta 64 bit version of XP fist, but it sucks. Looks like I can make a duel boot system now with FC2 & Gentoo. So, If you'll excuse me, I have some compiling to do on my Gentoo primary partition!
Everything is a control issue. Companies want to control their product.
Who better to control the company's product than the company?
Zealots want to control the companies.
Can you provide any more insight or is this just one of those "salt in the wound" generalizations? I've no idea what this is supposed to mean, unless you expect me to be cynical.
Users want to know that their investment will be safe in the future, that the company they are depending on won't close shop or turn their back on them. Completely understandable.
Now, do you have anything valuable to say?
Economics is extremely complicated, and I assure you that it is more complicated than just the purchase price for a card at the store.
You sound like you want us to listen to you because economics is "extremely complicated", yet you provide absolutely no insight into how economics works. Are we supposed to just glaze over at this point and forget what the issue was? What's your point?
Is there a way to specify the gcc used to compile a custom driver - it pukes on my gcc 3.3 - it wants the same compiler as the kernel 2.95. Help?
Are you really implying the world and the state of computer technology would both be better had IBM retained monopoly control of hardware?
To find out what would have happened if IBM kept monopoly control over hardware, look no further to Apple. Now I am not bashing Apple by any means, (I own a PowerBook), but compare the price of an apple computer to the price of an OEM computer from Dell, Gateway, HP, etc. Apples are A LOT more expensive, and though we can go back and forth about the quality of an Apple computer to a PC till the cows come home. The point is, when any one company is allowed to have a monoploy they set the price, instead of letting the market of supply and demand set the price.
THis is percisly why "Free Software" is a "good thing" and not some hippie comministic ideology. it allows for compition driving the cost of software to the margin, (as an Economics professor once told me, people think at the margin).
I hope ATI can catch up to compete because their current Linux drivers are terrible. I am disappointed. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
True.
No, companies want to control their revenue sources.
No, zealots want to control freedom of their code and the code that is based on or extends it.
...is another important thing :) Finally, proper 32bit ioctls and libraries, no more mixing 32/64 bit releases and trying to use indirect rendering.
Btw, that was done for DRI drivers quite a while ago - talk about the usefulness of having access to the source code. And no, they aren't that useless - you can still play UT2004 with them, although it won't look as good(and I didn't notice much difference, except for performance, in ET(btw, for some reason, my FX5200 is _way_ slower while playing on radar/battery maps in ET than in any map in UT2004)
Yeah, I had several valid responses. However, since reading that last line, I have zero interest in having the debate with an ass. Have a good day.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Okay, I'll take a stab at it. The bedrock of capitalism is simply a market system based on private ownership. Now, most people want to extend that into monopolistic control to maximize their own profit in self-serving interest, but at the same time consumers generally tend to want a lot of competitors that can offer substitutes that give them greater value.
But, the fact is that if IBM hadn't "goofed" and created a mostly open system, it's likely that either another more open system would have succeeded even though it had a lot of obvious fault or no system would have succeeded and the information age wouldn't be near the point it is. Why? Because a more open system allows for programmers, both hobbyist and capitalist, to more easily develop software for the system. This barrier to entry would mean less software overall which would directly decrease the demand for computers. At the same time, monopolistic control would keep prices high, fixing the quality sold at a smaller rate than it is today thanks to the vast number of clones.
So, it's unlikely IBM would have a better market share or sell more products. They might, still, be making more profit due to monopolistic pricing. It does seem unlikely for this to be the case, however, when various other architectures would have likely succeeded in IBM's place and relegated IBM computers into dinosaurs like the Amiga (no offense to the Amiga intended).
As for NVidia, there's at least two principle reasons why they might wish their drivers closed. The first is by closing the drivers they have stronger control over rebranding cards at different price points without modifying hardware which might increase sales without hurting sales on the higher priced cards. The second is NVidia has cross-licensed a variety of patents which probably puts them in the position of not having the authority to license said patentable idea under the GPL.
Without number two, number one could be fixed with creative hardware locking mechanisms. The total cost of such hardware locking would be minimal in comparison to the boosted sales of all the likely free porting and driver work done by volunteers on the NVidia driver. The fact is, NVidia is a hardware company so it is in their best interest to commoditize all software for their hardware to be run on. Open sourcing their driver, if possible, would very likely have this effect (it's hard to argue that it could have the reverse effect, at least).
The claim that trade secrets would somehow be revealed by open sourcing their driver is possible, but I would guess is unlikely as the majority of NVidia's actual trade secrets would be in *hardware*. All a driver is supposed to be is a standard interface for the OS, and if there are tasks beyond this in the driver NVidia would almost certainly advantage by sticking it in hardware as well. It's for this reason I assume NVidia's driver license policy is the main fault for them not open sourcing their driver.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
It's not like nobody can do it...
Thank you.
This is...
O
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CAPTURE THE FORWARD BUNKER!
Nobody throws money at a problem unless there is an insentive. Where was the insentive without the clones? Why do you think MS software sucks?
There is magic in their drivers, and it is explained EVERY SINGLE TIME NVIDIA GETS MENTIONED HERE. It's called a special OpenGL license from SGI and it's also some special in-house code.
Try to remember it this time, it's only the 400 millionth time it's been mentioned.
I just want to control what I rightfully own.
if a company refuses to let me use the product they sold me, then they better not get pissy when I reverse engineer it and post the information for the world to see.
Yeah, I had several valid responses. However, since reading that last line, I have zero interest in having the debate with an ass. Have a good day.
More salt in the wound - good, I see I made a good judgement of your message. And still, you have no value to add to the discussion. Good day yourself.
Where was the insentive without the clones?
Because there was also Apple. Also planned obselescence, etc.
Why do you think MS software sucks?
Interesting choice of company; it goes a fair distance to demonstrating my point. Would Windows be more secure today if competition had forced it to be throughout it's life? Sure. Would OSes be better in general? Almost certainly. Would MS have the market share it does today? No way.
Score 5: Moron.
Very good point. Apple computers are vastly superior, but have a smaller marketshare due to their thight control.
FOSS is not and never was communistic. It's free market liberalism at it's best. Pure competition with no goverment interference (from patents or copyrights). That makes propriatery software...
Richard Stallman:When I want freedom I'll work with whomever I damn well please.
Richard Stallman:You have to use what works, FOSS doesn't have decent replacements for most things, sorry RMS there's work to be done, we don't all get free grant money.
Remember those rental systems where you don't really own your system?
Richard Stallman:I guess the grants don't give him enough free money.
RMS, being the quintessential zealot has also stated that people should replace all closed software with FOSS even when it doesn't have the same capabilities, and encouraged people to never ever have a hand in writing proprietary software. RMS wants the power to tell you how to work, and how to use your system. He wants to be the one to tell you what is right and what is wrong as regards software, and what you do with it.
Quotes taken from here.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Unfettered, unrestricted capitalism is a fantasy that's neither democratic or American. It's only in the last couple of decades following Reagan that this particularly virulent form of ideology has become popular, the founding of America and most of its history had little to do with it. It's more corporatist than capitalist. The typical pejorative labeling of anyone who disagrees as 'socialist' or 'communist', by far the majority of the world incidentally, I can only hope is a sign of the end days of this world view.
Yeah, this is why I use the term zealot. I like Linux (anyone bringing up GNU/Linux can bite me. I know the history and respect GNU. It's unweildy), in fact I prefer it. But I call BS on the altruism of the philosophy behind much of the movement.
If you wanna say "here's our stand, and we stick by it", I respect that. If you say "any stand but ours is unholy and wrong", then you are attempting to control and I have no use fer ya.
I wouldn't violate the GPL, as a programmer I respect other coder's work and time. But I also don't buy into the demand that EVERYTHING be GPL's, or whatever license you prefer.
The world ain't black and white kiddies, time to realize the intelligent people have differing opinions most of the time...
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
the price of an OEM computer from Dell, Gateway, HP, etc.
funny you didn't even mention IBM. shows how their market share really held out when they opened standards. From the "IBM compatable" to now just found under "ect."
I have no crystal ball, but I think IBM would have done quite a bit better than it has now. There would still have been competition, from Apple and other companies, but there wouldn't have been companies springing out of the woodwork trying to capitalize on the open XT standard. Other companies would have been forced to spend presumably a fairly substantial amount of R&D money before starting to actually produce a product.
I would have expected to see maybe one more company rise up with a personal computer, but that's still far less competition than the 20 zillion companies we have now. But it would still be enough to ensure that progress was made and prices weren't outrageous.
For instance, Apple is still doing quite well, even in the face of the said 20 zillion PC manufacturers and a near monopolistic OS company.
(I want to see the number of units shipped by IBM and Apple, but can't find numbers...)
As for NVidia, there's at least two principle reasons why they might wish their drivers closed. The first is by closing the drivers they have stronger control over rebranding cards at different price points without modifying hardware which might increase sales without hurting sales on the higher priced cards. The second is NVidia has cross-licensed a variety of patents which probably puts them in the position of not having the authority to license said patentable idea under the GPL.
I'll give you two more:
3) Hardware manufacturers want the hardware to be as much of a black box as possible. Handing out driver source, thus exposing the hardware interface and not just the driver interface, provides more intformation about the hardware, and would make it easier to guess how it works. [You touched on this in your last pgh.]
4) NVidia has, historically, had pretty good drivers. Other companies, *cough* ATI *cough*, have not such a good track record. Despite what are probably enormous differences in hardware, NVidia source could still probably give ATI useful information about how to improve their own drivers. I've seen posts here lamenting that if only ATI's drivers were better, the posters would have gotten a card from them. So NVidia would probably lose people here.
I agree with you main point that there are times when holing on to the source code in encouraged. On-line games are one instance where I hope that the company does keep a lid on the code. I don't even certian Monopoly Operation systems for wanting to keep a close reign on there source, it is after all how they make money.
NVidia on the otherhand is making money purly on hardware and drivers are a sunk cost. They have to be availible or thier cards won't sell, and they have to be good or their cards will not be able to compete, but the hardware is what you hand your credit card over to aquire. There seems to be economic reason to with hold dirver source code other then habit and industry practice. The only explaination I can come up with is that the code reviels some intimate details about the inner workings of the hardware that should not be made public. On the other hand NVidia has been very open avout the capibilitits and functioning of their hardware and it is widly integrated into third party boards as in my IBM T41 laptop. (ok, I'll stop bragging)
In the end, I believe that the most important aspect of the free software movement has to do with hardware drivers. Remember RMS's story about wanting to modify the print queue to alert the right person when the printer jammed? With software, including operating systems, Open source is a philosophy about the plave and value of intelectual controls. Hardware drivers on the other hand allow one to use a piece of equipment that one physically owns. Open source drivers allow people to use the hardware they own in the manor that is most appropriate to their need and without the loss of commercial opprotunities. Therefore, I too would encourage NVidia to make their driver source code public.
JFMILLER
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
Methinks the only real reason you'd want to keep your drivers closed off is because you're artificially handicapping your hardware
Um, no.
0) nVidia might not own all the code they compile into their drivers. The license they have the code under might permit binary distribution, but not source.
1) nVidia's drivers contain large amounts of software that is better than any of their competition. They spent money developing this, and they want to milk the competitive edge it gives them. And that is okay.
2) nVidia has more control this way. The Firefox guys are holding control over their cool icons, because they don't want the cool icons slapped onto broken code; only Mozilla-official builds of Firefox get the cool icons. nVidia might want to be sure that no one runs with broken drivers, then thinks nVidia cards are all junk, when in reality some guy made a few "improvements" that broke things, and distributed the changed version anyway.
3) Other reasons are possible. "the only real reason" my left foot.
Personally, I would much much rather have FOSS drivers. But even more than that, I want drivers that work. I switched from a GeForce 4600 to a Radeon 9600 XT, and even though the Radeon is a much better card, it runs slower under Linux than the older GeForce. It's the drivers. ATI's Linux drivers for the 9600 XT are lame. I actually boot into Windows to play Unreal Tournament 2004, because the performance is so much better under Windows. When I had an nVidia card, my Linux 3D gaming performance was just fine.
If nVidia would make a programmable-shaders card that doesn't double as a space heater, I would probably buy it and replace the Radeon. I know that the Unreal Tournament guys check the server stats, and I want to be "voting" for Linux gaming, so I want them to see me running Linux when the check stats on the servers I have been visiting.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Alternatively, a variable page size (assigned at boot time, before paging is turned on) could also solve the problem, but that's probably not easy to implement in hardware, and would cause additional complexity elsewhere.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
The typical pejorative labeling of anyone who disagrees as 'socialist' or 'communist', by far the majority of the world incidentally, I can only hope is a sign of the end days of this world view.
I don't consider the above terms pejorative in the least. I'm a big government person. I'd like to see a universal healthcare plan. I'd like to see companies that abuse monopoly status drawn and quartered. (Or drawn and halved, or thirded, or whatever...) I think welfare, social security, etc. are very worthy causes.
But, I think that finding fault with trying to make your company do better, even at the expense of some universal progress, in the context of this discussion makes one's opinions so far away from unrestricted capitalism that it ceases to be able to be called capitalism at all.
I currently use a Dell Inspirion 8200 laptop for Linux with an older GeForce 4 Go, and I swapped in an ATI M-9, and I lost the ability to send the video signal to my external monitor. ATI has a long ways to go to catch nVidia. nVidia isn't 100% perfect, but if you want to play 3D accelerated games with minimal hassle, you use nVidia. This is on Mandrake 10 also. Maybe in 5 years ATI will have something generally useful...
Let's hope ATI follows suit.
It took 2 third party patches and a recompile to get it their driver to install on Fedora Core 2, and it still crashes WineX.
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
Also, releasing the source would allow the drivers to be compiled on the systems with your gcc optimizations instead of being forced to use binaries, which has nothing to do with whether you're going to modify the source or not. One of the biggest things about my Gentoo box was that you build everything optimized for your hardware, whereas these binaries have to be much more general. Sure, there may not really be a terribly significant difference, but it's just one more reason why it should be open source.
Finally, to get back to your first point (am I going in reverse?) You really can't revise the nv drivers because they're compiled binaries. Nothing is stopping you from modifying them except the little thing that it's not accessible code to modify, since if it was this thread wouldn't have started. As for getting another company's video card, the options are ATi, and Matrox, neither of which are any better in this regard, and in fact ATi is much worse, so while you are right that nothing is preventing me from buying someone else's video card, it's not the point since no one is playing nice with OSS (AFAIK, Matrox might actually be nicer about it all, but they're not really accessible to the public the way the other two companies are,) leaving penguin worshipers with no options. nVidia is the lesser of two evils to be sure, so they get my money (that and the awful ATi driver issues with Windows XP, but that's a different story) for now, but really only because no one is better. Saying nothing is preventing us from going elsewhere really seems to sidestep the actual issue by blaming the users for something we really can't avoid because the best solution is a partial one. Well, anyway, that's just my $0.02
I'm always right and I can prove it, because to the best of my knowledge, I've never been wrong.
sry about that.. I forgot that I need i-tags :(
Same here. ATI's low end hardware is _way_ better than nvidia's (and I just won't pay more than $150 bucks for a graphics card). I finally had to give up on trying to get a nice low end card locally and buy an old ti4200 from new egg. The worst thing is it's over a year old, was $76 bucks, and out-performs anything available for less than $200 I could find locally. There's just something wrong with that. But I guess it's better than watching another graphics card maker melt down like 3DFX did over the Banshee.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Just to let you know, there were comparatively a ton of PCs from the mid-1970s on. And invariably, the reason that IBM's version stuck was a combination of cheaper hardware (because of clones) and the fact that most developers never wrote apps for every single architecture that existed. It's this surplus of software in the beginning in comparison to other archs that really helped recursively propagate the IBM compatible PC (software leads to more users (mostly geeks at that point) leads to more software..). Even today with a virtual machine available to write all code to to run on varied archs, the majority of code is written for one arch and one OS because it allows accessing OS features and is generally "easier" to write and is faster (okay, hypothetically faster given how JITs have overcome most the limitations of having an intermediary language).
Now as for your points, #3 ignores that in both Windows and Linux, it's possible to trace through the driver and the the actual hardware for any function you use. Admittedly, it's not as easy and requires more, but it's not like through software accessing the hardware H&L engine through a closed driver somehow not "light up" the hardware any more than an open driver, so the hardware end is only vaguely made more of a mystery if one is trying to clone the hardware.
As for the second point, good drivers generally come about because of a combination of good engineers and good hardware. If the hardware is the cause, no amount of driver hints from the competition will help. On the other hand, if it's a quality of engineer problem, it's very unlikely that the ATI engineers would be capable of properly understand NVidia's source to actually use it in their driver. (It's at this point, I would like to state that my two points are obviously over-generalizations, and I don't know the fully story of why ATI's drivers have through my own experience been rather crappy. For this reason, I hope to not offend any ATI engineer who's not responsible for this fact.)
So, if those two points are invalid, the only thing open source drivers mean is even better drivers (since nvidia driver bugs can actually be found and traced by the kernel developers, which has been a big nagging point for people) and more customers (since there are actual hold-outs using the few open source ATI drivers because they either technically (for bug reporting purposes) or morally object to using closed drivers). I'm sure that NVidia is aware of this, and I would guess that it very likely they would love to give Torvalds or others access to the source to offer better support which only increases their reputation and sales. Of course, I could be completely wrong, but that's how it all looks to me.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
You've never played EverQuest. Crack addiction does not even begin to describe it. "Soul-consuming" might be a start.
Your point in the first paragraph is well taken. Second paragraph too, but I really don't think there'd be that much of a difference. ;-)
But:
You really can't revise the nv drivers because they're compiled binaries. Nothing is stopping you from modifying them except the little thing that it's not accessible code to modify, since if it was this thread wouldn't have started.
The nv driver is not the official release from NVidia. It's a part of XFree86 (and now X.org), and is available under the MIT license or whatever they call it.
Yes, I totally agree.
Richard Stallman also seems to be totally oblivious to the fact that large scale, well-written software takes vast amounts of time to produce, not to mention years of practice. I have written free software before, and I use OSS, but in a capitalist society, closed source software is the only truly viable option for a programmer to make money.
Imagine a world with nothing but free software. It just wouldn't work. Most OSS programmers write closed-source software in their spare time.
Now as for your points, #3 ignores that in both Windows and Linux, it's possible to trace through the driver and the the actual hardware for any function you use. Admittedly, it's not as easy and requires more, but it's not like through software accessing the hardware H&L engine through a closed driver somehow not "light up" the hardware any more than an open driver, so the hardware end is only vaguely made more of a mystery if one is trying to clone the hardware.
Which makes it easier to figure out: said trace of the driver's activity, or (hopefully) reasonably documented C code? Right.
As for the next point, about driver quality, you bring up an interesting point. But I would find it hard to believe if NVidia's software engineers are that much better than ATI's, unless there was a significant pay disparity. The only thing that I could think of is that perhaps NVidia just has *more* of them, so they are not as hurried and susceptable to the deadline syndrome. If this were the case, the engineers could still learn a few tricks.
4) The RIAA/MPAA/"enemy of the week" can sneek in DRM under those pesky "OSS zelots" radars.
My mistake, yeah, that is open source. I wasn't thinking and thought of the nvidia module, not nv. Actually, I run the nvidia module, truth be told, because I don't care about corrupting my kernel with non GPL, but for the other nVidia hardware... well, you obviously read it already. And no, probably not that big of a difference, but I wanted the post to be longer ;-)
I'm always right and I can prove it, because to the best of my knowledge, I've never been wrong.
"An even better story will be when folks realize that it is OK for the whole world not to agree with them on philosophy. Especially when those philosophies have economic ramifications."
For whom? Those who have the money, or those who desire the money of those who have it.
Here's another:
5) It makes support more uniform. NVidia's support lines I'm sure don't want to deal with having 3 different forks of the driver code, nor do they want to have to deal with figuring out if problems people are reporting are due to the hardware, their part of the driver, or some third party's driver. Sure, they could say they only offer support for the official version or something, but then the lines still have to deal with people who don't have it but call anyway, lie and say they have it but don't, etc.
/lib/modules/2.6.7-gentoo-r7/video/nvidia.ko: Cannot allocate memory.
Anyone else seeing this? Any ideas? Anybody?
I am not an expert, but NVIDIA doesn't have to Free their OpenGL implementation, only tell us how to program the chip so that we can use an existing OpenGL implementation (Mesa) on it.
That means compatability
Aargh, not again. It is compatibility.
You were trying to do very intrinsic things to Linux and then complaint. Such low level changes are hard to do on any system. The good thing - they are unnecessary for novice user. For you, as an inexperienced linux user, I would recommend to use FC2 installer and then just use the system. It has web browser/office suite/etc. Read Fedora support site - some things(NTFS) you were trying to do are not supported by Fedora yet. This would save you some time.
Oh, too bad I already formatted my FC2 partition and installed SuSE. :)
Really, I have been a long time redhat/fedora user, and fedora core 2 was the breaking point for me. Don't get me wrong, I like redhat stuff. But it sometimes seemed a little too ahead of everthing else. And I know someone's going to say I could've used a vanilla kernel or something like that, but I really didn't want to go for that option.
It's just that even though Fedora is somewhat of a "testing" ground for redhat, it can seem a little unstable.
I just want to use my own computer. Making things harder for manufacturers who provide binary drivers or would provide them if they were supported better prevents this.
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
So, what you're basically saying is you're a pragmatist, aka a sell-out. You are not an idealist. You spend your time playing games, not programming.
You would give up on Linux if you ever had to do some reverse-engineering and programming yourself to get something to work.
I'm going to be the first to break this to you - Linux is not for you. Keep it on your servers so you can have a free UNIX, but by no means use it as your desktop. Given you don't care in the slightest about having access to the source code of every single component on your system, and a guaranteed permission to modify and redistribute it as you see fit, then you really don't need Linux. Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X both subscribe to this "unchangeable, private" philosophy, and should fit your "rather have something closed that works" needs very well. Be honest, you're a PC gamer. You already have Windows. Why bother with Linux if you're just running closed source software on a closed-source tainted kernel?
Do you really think NVIDIA's staff are the only people in the world who do cutting edge graphics programming? Do you really think NVIDIA are the only people who could make the "special sauce"? Most of the advances in graphics technology have come from academia, where the "secrets" are published globally, they're not kept under lock and key.
Does my bum look big in this?
It would be interesting if another card manufactuer released the drivers for the their card and opened sourced them. If it proved popular would NVIDIA do something similar?
Have any of you had any performance problems with these drivers? They seemed to be sooo much slower than the previous driver, I wonder whether some config option needs to be tweaked after the upgrade.
What's extremely commendable, this this time there is a graphical tuning utility. We're getting there...
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
This also means KnoppiXMAME will be able to kick it up a notch. I have been waiting for this to develop my next version. Somebody needs to include these drivers in a vanilla distro. Keep your eyes out..
P.S. I have researched re-distribution clauses in both NVidia and ATI's drivers. There is nothing stopping people from including these drivers in their distros. Besides partisan software belivers that is. bahahahhaa! Evil rules your etch-a-sketch! muahahaha!
I'm not quite sure how a world with nothing but Free software wouldn't work; can you elaborate on that point? I'm not saying that it's something which I feel is a vital event (though it would be nice), but I don't see how it wouldn't work.
I really don't mean to be rude but you should make an effort to understand the concept better before you start bashing someone like RMS. And no, I am not against closed software, I just happen to prefer it open due to it's educational value. You know, it's people like you who make me think that there actually are Microsoft employees infiltrating Slashdot.
There are software Quadro hacks for Windows. Go look for RivaTuner. Thing is, it's not the magic that many forum dwellers seem to assume:
It actually slows game performance in many cases. Games are written for consumer cards, not pro ones, and what is good for pro apps isn't always good for consumer apps. Hacking your card to look like a Quadro (or getting a real one) won't make your shit run faster, if your shit is games.
More importantly, GeForces aren't certified by pro companies. This is important if you are doing REAL work where fuckups caused hacked drivers aren't acceptable. You want tech support, you use hardware they support. That is part of the money you pay in a Quadro, is the pro software saying "we'll support this".
It's kinda like Orcale on Linux. They support very specific, enterprise, Linux versions like RHEL and SUSE Enterprise. They WILL NOT support you if you use the consumer versions (also I've never been able to get to install on the consumer version properly). They aren't willing to play games, they'll only support the big-daddy distros they like. Don't like it? Don't as for support, or go install it on Windows.
There's a difference between the univeristy warez d00d that download Maya, hacks his GeForce and piddles around and the professional working to make a movie. When there's money involved and time costs you, you are willing to pay for certified solutions to minimise the problems.
Just use 4K stacks. Much simpler than always allocating 2 x 4KB adjacent pages, with the associated waste. Sort of like taking two steps forwards all the time, just in case you might want to move that far sometimes.
Your solution is very wasteful just to cater for one or two exception manufacturers who won't release their hardware programming information.
One of the Unix tenents is to "optimise for the common case". Binary modules are not the common case, so always allocating 2 x adjacent 4KB pages wouldn't be following that tenent.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
I must admit-I am a bit suprised that SLASHDOT didn't pick up on it. It might just be a little insignificant thing which doesn't warrant much attention anyway-who knows. Of course everyone is mentioning the support for 4k stacks. And of course this is important. Anyone who has used Andrew Morton's patch set knows what a PITA this issue was. But nvidia even did more than fix the single most blocking issue regarding their drivers and the 2.6.x kernels.
They also:
Added support for ACPI
Fixed problem that prevented 32-bit kernel driver from running on certain AMD64 CPUs.
Added support for GLSL (OpenGL Shading Language).
along with the new nvidia-settings utility-GPL'ed and written in GTK2....
and finally they added:
Added a new Xv adaptor on GeForce4 and GeForce FX which uses the 3D engine to do Xv PutImage requests.
Now I am not an expert on such things-25 years of experience and I am still left asking more questions than my ability to answer. _But I noticed this little innocuous "xv" thing and was like WOW-cool. I leave it up to those who know more to shoot me down-but doesn't this little "xv" thing mean that all those Linux users who use nvidia GeForce4 and FX cards suddenly got a a tremendous boost when doing much of anything with video ? After all XV is what all of the video players under Linux use for good quality full-screen video(mplayer, xine, totem, gxine, helixplayer etc.)
Now if I understand this correctly everytime a PutImage() request comes along under XV this is handed over to the 3D engine-automatically. It seems as if this would be a very, very significant reduction in CPU usage-particularly for older generation(PII/PIII) machines which happen to have fairly modern graphic cards. Full-screen divx under mplayer with the new drivers uses 12% CPU on average on my machine-I unfortunately did not do a benchmark to test this-but if my memory serves me correctly this is significantly less than what is was with the older drivers.
Now the downside to this-at least for the time being- is that some apps don't quite work with these new changes-Xine-and it's siblings(totem,gxine, kxine etc.)
But I assume these will be fixed pronto.
Well where am I going qoing with this train of thought:
Putting this kind of support for XV in the NVIDIA drivers -is really simple for the NVIDIA guys-perhaps even trivial-but it can mean a tremendous improvement for the users of these cards. NVIDIA has always treated Linux like a second class citizen-but hey who can complain-at least they acknowledge that Linux exists-compared to the BSD's Linux support is great-of course only if you are using x86 CPU's. Now everyone knows that the graphic workstation market has all but disappeared. But what if NVIDIA was to decide to simply really take advantage of the X11 windowing system and it's features.
Imagine if NVIDIA would actually provide good RENDER support-wow what a difference that would make for 2D desktop support-particularly under GNOME which uses RENDER extensively in VTE/PANGO-ie. why text scrolling in gnome-terminal is so abysmal. I am still stumped by the fact that the open-source X11 nvidia drivers support RENDEr far, far better than NVIDIA's own in-house drivers.....
Imagine if NVIDIA would really support the libfixes, libdamages and libcomposite extensions which are currently being developed at Xorg-X11. Sun's Looking Glass is already using libdamages and libfixes-I got it up and running on my machine yesterday-and yes it is still pre-alpha-but I have never, ever seen such a fluid desktop environment. This tech is almost *evil*- the promise which it presents is simply baffling-rendering all previous X11 windowing experiences to the days of the stone age. I don't really care that much about Looking Glass-if NVIDIA properly supports the X11 extensions we will have cairo-enabled desktops inside of the next year which will fundamentally alter the X11 experience for X users.
Ok. So here is the point of this little essay: If NVIDIA would simpl
No muchie to add really folks, just this linkage....
b ef ffec2e9be58fa181ba97b1c627de8&f=61
h ow to/
;-)
:-)
http://www.rage3d.com/board/forumdisplay.php?s=
http://www.rage3d.com/content/articles/atilinux
Xcuse the length of the URLz but the Nvidia FUD needs to be corrected....
Now maybe ATI will send me a new card
Enjoy folks & Peace.
Greek Geek
Thanks! Which one of the 10,000+ results should I read? Is it much better than a direct answer from a fellow Slashdotter?
(Read: You, Sir, are a moron and should go away.)
With a 4K stack that's only an order 0 and finding a single free page is very easy and fast.
Talking about page sizes:
x86 uses usually 4K and has an option for bigpages, 4M/page. This is used for kernel adressing to perform better (smaller pagetables) and can afaik also requested for user stuff, but I don't know how at the very moment.
64bit CPUs as alpha used to have 8KB/page, with a similar bigpage-concept as above, sometimes they have 3-4 pagesizes to configure, eg for HUGEMEM-applications like databases with huge buffers, so there are less pagetable-entries to allocate and administer.
Hope everyone's satisfied now.
Honest question: What's all the noise about NVidia drivers?
I'm not a gamer, but is it that?
Or is it that people keep buying machines that have NVidia chips on board?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Or go out and revise the nv drivers. Nothing (I would assume) prevents you from doing so.
I don't know the driver, so I cannot say for sure. But AFAIK the problem is that you have to chose between a buggy closed source driver that only work with some kernel versions, and a open source driver written by people without access to hardware specifications, which means it is bound to be buggy and badly performing.
Nothing prevents you from getting a video card from another company.
If I knew a company with good support, I would support them. Good support means complete hardware specification available to all developers, and that the company tests their hardware with at least one GPL'ed driver.
Besides, what would 99.9% of linux people do even if it was open source?
They would use the driver provided with their distribution.
And for the 0.1% of people who do mess with it, unless they discovered some great tweak that would provide a significant feature or speed advantage over the NVidia drivers
Probably you wouldn't see much improvements in terms of rendering speed. But you would see bugfixes and maybe improvements in case the driver might sometimes cause a performance degrade of the rest of your system. There are different ways for the improvements to end up on end users machines, the most likely go through the users' preferred distribution.
I trust them more since the quality of their drivers partially determines their sales, and thus they have a bigger motivation to make them better.
You wish. I think it took way too long time for them to release a version that worked with 4KB stacks. But an open source version might even improve the version of the driver supplied by NVidia. As patches become available it would be fairly easy for NVidia to include in the version they supply. But of course most end users wouldn't use it unless the one that came with their distribution didn't work.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
you have to let nVidia control your computer
Ok, I'll bite - in what way does NVidia control my computer if I use their drivers? Because they get to say what features go in and what are left out? I don't know the first thing about writing graphics card drivers, so either way, it's not up to me.
Because they could put $eevilMalwareFeature in them? With open source drivers, I'd still have to trust that this hasn't happened, as (as above) I wouldn't know a benign graphics driver from an eevil one, especially as I wouldn't look at the source.
Saying that NVidia controls my PC is akin to saying that Mandrake controls it - after all, open source or not, I have neither the time nor the inclination to check all that source. Either way, it could be doing *anything*, and I wouldn't know.
At the end of the day, you have to trust *someone*. Companies are not automatically evilly hegemonistic, company employees writing closed source code are not automatically evil, and open source coders are not automatically good.
I trust NVidia not to do anything stupid. They'd be found out eventually, and the backlash would surely more than cancel out whatever small benefit they derived from it. Being binary-only didn't stop people working out that the drivers cheated to improve performance for common benchmark tests, remember?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Why bother--even if nvidia did compile them for ppc Linux, you still can't play Enemy Territory...
nVidia is the lesser of two evils to be sure, so they get my money (that and the awful ATi driver issues with Windows XP, but that's a different story) for now
:-)
my money too. i'm sick of crappy ATi drivers and software. and that's why my new card is GeForce FX. and imho nVidia GPU design is much better too
It's the Shiny Objects Factor. Please are gamers, and they try to be pro-free software at the same time. So they gladly install binary-only, proprietary, unfree device drivers to be able to see Shiny Objects on screen, in the process throwing out all their precious principles momentarily, spitting in the face of everything that made Linux possible.
Real free software followers choose freedom over Shiny Objects.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
I trust them more since the quality of their drivers partially determines their sales, and thus they have a bigger motivation to make them better.
I have an SiS chipset system right now as my main desktop. It's not the best, but it's not the least. And I don't need high power 3D, I only need good 2D (video) playback on the system. And linux has pretty good (open) SiS drivers and I wanted a smallish system with an "all in one" motherboard, so I went with an SiS765. And, in fact, my system works BETTER in linux than in windows XP or 2000 even *after* I have installed the very latest and greatest from their website *and* added one of those fancy windows toolbar widgets to let me microadjust the scan rate and resolution.
When I install mdk10 or suse9.1 or fc2 it lets me set the resolution of the display to something truly useful like 1440x1050 or 1280x960 rather than the fucked-up distortion that is 1280x1024 - which is all the factory drivers in windows can manage between 1024x768 and an ungodly (for my eyes on my 19" monitor) 1600x1200. And these distros do it right from the default install screen, and I don't even HAVE to adjust anything to get the highest possible scan rate at these settings. But if what you say were true then SiS should have even *better* video drivers available in windows since they (presumably) are motivated by all that income potential and, after all, they have that insight from those linux geeks on which ot base their own work. So if a bunch of geeks can reverse engineer or just read the docs and *create* drivers of this quality, why can't the manufacturer?
This is the greatest lie of the Capitalist church: that money is the greatest motivation above all even in a free market, and that it will lead to the higher quality product every time. If what you say were at all true then SiS should have some insanely great XP drivers for their 7xx chipsets - so why is it the open source drivers beat them hands down?
If you make them open source the driver code then it levels their playing field with the competetion (who are not open source). The competition can optimise their own code based on NVidias code factoring. If ATI can get just a single percent improvement over NVidia they will automatically sell more units. This is how NVidia stands to lose over open sourcing the drivers. Me, personally, I don't mind a little closed source on my box if it means I can play Unreal Tournament "The way it was meant to be played"; on GNU/Linux :-)
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
I tried the last version before this one. I ran the .run file and it failed saying "cannot fine module name". Huh? This driver couldn't find its ass with its own two hands.
If you open your mind too wide, people will throw trash in it.
The "zealots" just want to control their own computers.
Yeah! And I want complete control of my Subaru. Where's the source code for all of the microprocessor driven systems in the vehicle?
Go buy a Radeon 8500, I hear they're supported in open source completely. My GeForce 5900 under Slack 10 works just fine with closed source drivers, thank you.
"Unfettered, unrestricted capitalism is a fantasy" - only because any time it shows up, regulation follows along behind. (Similar dilution happens with other "pure" implementations of economic theories.)
"only in the last couple of decades"? what about the great big monopolistic empires of the late 19th Century? Standard Oil? United Steel? J P Morgan and Carnegie? The railroads? These are the reasons the original anti-trust laws were passed. (And before that, go back to the East India Company and the other government-licensed charter companies.)
Corporatism is a political system which is not at all at odds with "pure" or even regulated capitalism (an economic system).
People are always going to label people or arguments they dislike with names for other things they dislike, whether it's "you poopoo-head!" on the playground, "communist" or "Nazi" (or "capitalist") for adults. Are you hoping that's a "sign of the end days of this world view"? Keep hoping, 'cause people have been dismissing (or attacking) other people as "socialist" or "communist" pretty much since those terms were coined.
Just look for a large struct or array on the
stack, or perhaps some recursion. Find it and
fix it. There are tools to help find these
problems. The tools are regularly run against
the official kernel source, while proprietary
drivers miss out.
I'm sure I could have fixed the problem in a day.
er, I think these drivers will also help me running Gentoo and Slack workstations. They've been running 2.6 for ages...
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
I wouldn't care if the drivers were binary, but why not allow OpenGL to be used on more targets than just X. MesaGL works just fine on the framebuffer, on SDL, even on aalib; why can't nVidia's version do the same? And support the regular framebuffer console _with_mode_switching_ (which VESA fb does not do). Is this really so hard?
I see these articles all the time, and to me, it seems this struggling with drivers and vendor lock in with using exact specific cards for the video is the problem. Is it possible to use a comopletely separate computer to just run the video? All the cards are is a small computer system with an onboard cpu-like thing, on board ram, some controller chips etc, which to my layperson's understanding is just another form of a normal mobo and assorted gear on it stuck on a card you slap in a PCI slot or whatever. So, my question is, would it be possible to just use another computer to opensource replace the whole video card experience? Have a computer you could build yourself that mimiced what a video card does, and have drivers that can be easily written GPL fashion then? I understand you'd have to be able to get normal computer A to talk to video card emulator computer B. Just asking the smart guys here if this has ever been done, if it's possible, is it a lame idea or a good idea long term, etc? Just seems with the ability to have gigs of ram and high speed chips, etc easily obtainable on the mobo of your choice, this might be a completely alternate way to go other than being stuck with basically a couple of companies and driver hassles all the time, to move it away from propietary.
Of course,I admit I have no idea, hence asking.
ATI has been "full supporters" of Linux for many years now.
1
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=514
Are you familiar with ATI's support for native X calls? Why try and squeeze water from a stone when their is a company that is fully committed to Linux already?
As for graphics workstation, we use Linux thin clients at my office and I would like to get accelerated graphics running on them. But like you say, it requires that the card support the native calls in order to be effective. Your comments regarding xv have me woundering if the new drivers would speed up the Mozilla Flash plugin, which is a CPU and bandwidth hog.
Kind Regards
"A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us w
This is the problem with the closed source drivers; for me it's not about controlling one's computer, it's about making the hardware I paid for work. It's about customer service. nVidia supposedly has the best drivers under Linux, but getting bug fixes or technical support are next to impossible.
Either nVidia should open their drivers(ideal) so users can attempt to maintain them or they and other graphics companies should provide high-quality linux drivers for their customers.
These drivers are still closed-source (except for the "kernel interface layer", a la VMWare and their similar layer). There are still no real "mass-market" cards with vendor-supplied open-source/free software drivers, or that supply complete specs to the OSS/FS communities. People who use "exotic" architectures such as SPARC or PPC with their Linux/*BSD installations are still SOL.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Nvidia can't or won't open source their driver? Okay, we have to live with that. But riddle me this, what is so secret about the register level specs of the cards? As the ALSA guys say, "We don't want the Verilog or anything. We just want the information necessary to write a driver."
The result of this will likely be a driver that is not as fast and full featured as Nvidia's drivers. On the other hand, the driver will work across architectures and won't be plauged by silly problems like these 4k stacks. It will probably work correctly for more hardware cases. I have the Nvidia drivers and a SIS648 chipset on my machine. If I enable Hyperthreading, virtual terminals only work intermittently and my uptime will be something less than one day. I can see plenty of situations where I would like the choice between incomplete but throughly debugged 3D and all the bells and whistles.
I used to run a Matrox G400. Yeah, 3D was weak but those drivers were solid. I seriously doubt there is anything sooper-sekret about the hardware interfaces to these cards.
The drivers are certainly gratis, but probably not entirely unencumbered. NVidia is a hardware company, and who knows, maybe they actually use proprietary 3rd party libraries in their driver source. Speaking purely from speculation, however.
Waiting for ad.doubleclick.net...
Go, outside. Try and get laid. You'll never have a job where you'll move up the chain. You'll be unemployed at 50 cursing kids nowadays.
These drivers also appear to have fixed a pesky bug that made some athlon64 based systems only able to use the 64bit driver. I wasnt looking forward to reinstalling my system, and now I can play games! My system is an hp pavilion a530n in case anyone wants to know a specific system affected.
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
There are still serious bugs left from the previous revision, which was six months ago. That's a bit long to wait. While GLSL and 6800 support is nice, an interm bugfix wouldn't be unwelcome...
A problem that leaves the console framebuffer blank after X is started remains. You need to work around it by adding
Option "IgnoreDisplayDevices" "TV"
to your xorg.conf. If you are actually using TV out, this could be a bit annoying.
Even worse, it hasn't been more than 24 hours since I've installed them, and these drivers have already hung X twice. When an OpenGL process segfaulted, that process assumes state D (uninteruptable sleep), and becomes completely unkillable, along with X itself. I haven't figured out how to reboot cleanly once this happens. All I can do is ssh in, sync the disks, and hit the power button.
This is very good news for AMD64 owners.
You're just mad because the voices in your head talk to me.
In fact they are by definition at leas the ones that sell stock. If they were not their shareholders would sue them into non existence, for not maximizing their profits in every possible way.
As for getting another company's video card, the options are ATi, and Matrox, neither of which are any better in this regard,
I have an Intel 865-based motherboard in this computer and the onboard video gives me 998 to 1003 fps with glxgears. This is under Fedora Core 2 and nothing but the stock driver that Fedora set up by magic when I installed the operating system.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
While i'm generaly sharing your conclusions, you forget one interesting point here: it's common practice of graphic card vendors to tune their driver specifically for some selected benchmarks. This would not be possible witch an OS driver for obvious reasons.
The claim that trade secrets would somehow be revealed by open sourcing their driver is possible, but I would guess is unlikely as the majority of NVidia's actual trade secrets would be in *hardware*.
That's an assumption based on no known evidence or facts at all.
All a driver is supposed to be is a standard interface for the OS,
Winmodems, anyone? Brother printer drivers? Etc...
and if there are tasks beyond this in the driver NVidia would almost certainly advantage by sticking it in hardware as well. It's for this reason I assume NVidia's driver license policy is the main fault for them not open sourcing their driver.
See above. It's 100% guesswork.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
If this Linux kernel was a true contender up against Microsoft, then it would allow internal 4k support to be available while traditionally allowing backwards compatibility to bootstrap 8k support.
I don't know the status of such feat.
Otherwise, this is just a sourcecode compile-time pragma-hell where the kernel is just a giant monolithic static peice of code where every internal option can't be available: no homebrew kernels may ever be the same; a PITA to tech support.
Damn... Now I have to rewrite my BIOS, and HD firmware, monitor firmware (so I will not need the tinfoil hat anymore), CD drive firmware... Oh man!! That's it, going back to my Lucy Mac!
We're talking about kernel stacks here, which aren't swappable virtual memory. Prior to the addition of the 4KiB stack option to kernel 2.5, Linux on i386 always allocated two contiguous 4KiB pages to hold the task structure and the kernel stack. (In Linux, the "current()" macro works by just taking the value of the stack pointer and aligning it downwards to find the task struct.)
:-)
Cache line sizes vary between architectures and their implementations, but nobody has a 4KiB cache line size!
And as far as "better performance" goes, not really, unless memory is full.
The old nVidia driver must have had a largish buffer declared as an "auto" variable local to a function, or maybe used alloca(). By cleaning out such usage from the kernel, the hassle of allocating a contiguous pair of pages per process on i386 can now be avoided.
(In the machine I've been porting the kernel to, the minimal page size is 64KiB, so this feature hasn't been much of an issue.
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
" ATI has been "full supporters" of Linux for many years now."
Umm, Okay. Whatever Dude. ATI's support of Linux has sucked for years and compared to what Nvidia has done.
You are either deluded or an ATI fanboi. I say that knowing how gay that sounds and how overused it is, but in this case its true. For years and years Nvidia has been the only legitmate option on Linux for gaming.
btw the fact that you linked to that article shows how little you know about ATI's linux support. That article as best is a testament to how shitty ATI's linux support has been. When those drivers finally came out they were long overdue and only supported outdated hardware.
When it comes to graphics drivers and gaming on Linux nvidia is the only way to go. If you had any clue about the history of the way both companies have supported Linux over the years you wouldn't be posting garbage like that.
Linux allocates a page (or contiguous set of aligned pages) to hold both the "struct task" and the kernel stack. The struct task is at the beginning of the page and the kernel stack grows downward from the end. So a kernel stack overflow is really deadly, since the "struct task" gets overwritten with stack data when that occurs.
Also, the address of this page (or set thereof) is just a regular kernel-space address. Even if the "struct task" weren't at the beginning of the page, a kernel stack overflow wouldn't cause any kind of page fault event; you'd just start writing over the last bytes of the previous page.
"Skill shows through where genius wears thin." -Wittgenstein || Religion: uniting aviation and architecture.
(anyone bringing up GNU/Linux can bite me. I know the history and respect GNU. It's unweildy)
GNU/Linux really is awkward to say or type. It needs to be abbreviated to have any hope of catching on.
If you wanna say "here's our stand, and we stick by it", I respect that. If you say "any stand but ours is unholy and wrong", then you are attempting to control and I have no use fer ya.
I think that it is wrong to deliberately cripple a tool that otherwise could have been useful, just as some people think its wrong to eat meat. Take some old video games for example; they are a chunk of our culture and in some cases the source is lost. It's not a matter of life or death, but its not nice either.
I wouldn't violate the GPL, as a programmer I respect other coder's work and time. But I also don't buy into the demand that EVERYTHING be GPL's, or whatever license you prefer.
No one is demanding anything, but a time when most software is Free, is a goal the FSF is working toward. I see no problem with that.
If they had (or have) a vectored interface for the drivers to use (all the driver callable support routines) and a jump table for the driver initialization to fill in, then kernal changes don't require driver updates except to have drivers take advantage of new support in the kernal or support libraries. Heck RSX-11 M and M Plus on PDP-11s had this ages ago (pre-PC). And since revealing the source to a driver pretty much opens the hardware up for full inspection, the manufacturers of hardware really don't like doing that without restrictive licenses since they'd lose competitive advantages. So until we can all just print out our new hardware in our homes or offices open-source hardware is not going to florish, hence competition is what will drive products to improve. A few billion dollars in the hands of some dedicated hardware engineers might change that, but then where would we all be when they orphaned a project?
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Since debian does not do this, the debian kernel could just be configured to not use 4K stacks.
while (!asleep()) sheep++
The problem is, many folks ARE demanding... whenever a new piece of software comes out, 1/2 the posts here are "why didn't they GPL it, those bastards", and it gets silly.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
The drivers should always become open source, at least when the product is no longer being sold. If a company would make that promise, I would be more interested in buying their hardware. Of course nVidia still supports their oldest geforce cards with the same driver, so they'd never go for that.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm fully aware of the liscensing issues and the whole PITA that doing that for them would involve, but here's the thing:
Right now, I have to "dual-boot" my X depending on whether I want good RENDER performance or want to run OpenGL stuff. My webpage has a theme I really like that my boyfriend made. The background is an animated GIF of rain falling. I'll get 100% CPU usage on my Athlon XP 1400+ and my browser will become practically unresponsive using the "nvidia" driver, but when I switch over to the open source "nv" driver, it does maybe 15% CPU usage -- just like in Windows.
Mesa as absolutely unacceptable for doing 3D graphics. Even a simple shooter I'm working on called "Blammo" for the time being will chug to about 5 fps under "nv."
Now, if only we could bring the features of the "nv" driver and the "nvidia" driver together.
I think the main problem with "linux being ready for the desktop" (as though it isn't -- all that linux really lacks is the ability to twist the arms of OEMs) is that if you want to use certain hardware, you can't get optimal drivers. This is, of course, a vicious circle, because NVidia could fix the problem I have in the "nvidia" driver tomorrow if they wanted, but they won't, because the target market is too small to waste their time.
I might be willing to pay $300 for a brand-spanking-new ubervideocard once the X drivers get fixed, but there are also about 300 other people willing to do the same so long as the Windows drivers stay working.
Perhaps the solution therefore is to change the liscense on the "nv" driver so that NVidia can use the code that's already out there. It makes the authors of the "nv" driver saints, and NVidia stays an evil corporation, and I get Windows-like performance out of my hardware in X, and everyone's happy.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
How about an example:
Say the card supports some nifty feature, let's call it texture compression. It would be nifty because textures could be compressed by the CPU. Then when the GPU needed them, it could suck them across the video bus in compressed form, then uncompress them on the card. Doing so would definitely provide a performance boost (since it would allow more data to traverse the GPU bus in a given amount of time) but would also require that the driver implments texture compression since that operation has to happen on the CPU side.
OK so far, but what if NVidia licensed this texture compression alogrithm from a 3rd party that's unwilling to allow public release of their codec? There are two choices: 1) Ship a closed-source or partially closed-source driver or 2) ship an open source-driver that can't support texturing. If I were NVidia, trying to make a profit by providing the fastest graphics hardware, I'd pick option 1 in a heartbeat.
Now repeat the above problem a couple dozen times and you've got the picture. I don't expect to see a fully open-source driver for cutting edge graphics hardware from any vendor anytime soon.
I may have something fubared in my install, but I just put it in, and where glxgears ran 180 or so fps using the nv driver in kernel-2.6.7-mm3, now it breaks a sweat to get past 90fps.
I'm still investigating why the glx stuff seems to not be answering the roll call at startx time.
tuxracer, which ran but at a glacial pace using nv, taking a minute or so to even find the quit button and exit it, now damages part of the screen and crashes, requireing a hardware reset and fsck'ing of about 120 GB of disks (can you say watching varnish dry for half an hour?) to recover.
How about the rest of you users, any war stories that may help me?
Cheers, Gene
Sure, and this is the right approach to the problem. You support companies that act in a way you like, so both parties get to act freely and in their own self interest.
The approach I object to is the fanatical condemnation of anything closed, under any circumstances.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Plan 9 is a very interesting operating system. Its problem is that it was, and still is, too far ahead of its time. It throws away 30+ years of computer hardware and operating systems design for a network centric approach.
Like Unix style operating systems, Plan 9 makes all system resources available in a hierarchical namespace. However unlike the Unix file system, access to the namespace takes place at the network level. With this design, the physical location of a resource cannot be determined by the user. (The other interesting feature is that the namespace changes for each running process, but that is beyond the scope of this thread.)
Using the Plan 9 architecture, a "computer" is built by stringing together a network of file servers, processor servers, and terminals. Making the video device a 3D accelerated server would be a natural extension of this idea.
Of course, the devil is in the details. Plan 9 is not in wide use because it has very limited hardware and software support. Existing hardware and operating systems architectures are "good enough" for general purpose use, so hardware and software vendors see no need to develop for Plan 9 (think Linux 5-10 years ago).
Furthermore, though I have no experience with serious Plan 9 use, I doubt Plan 9 is optimized to the point where it could serve as the rival of a modern 3D accelerated graphics card for a comparable price. So, as outlined earlier in this thread, a good deal of research and development would still be required.
As time goes on, "traditional" operating systems like Linux and Windows are slowly, slowly taking on Plan 9 attributes like pseudo-network transparency. They do it in a kludgy, inferior way but (and this is the important bit) they maintain backward compatibility. Thus, I think it is increasingly unlikely that a pure architecture like Plan 9 will ever come into widespread use outside of a research lab.
The preceding comments reflect the author's personal opinion and are public domain, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
>I'm curious to how you came to the conclusion that IBM wouldn't have improved their architecture without pressure from the clones.
No problem, I can put it simple for you (seems you like to use titles to insult, beats me why, but that usually means I have to spell things out simply, rather than in depth).
I went by past expereiences of the computer age. Competition vs. none. The wildcard being Apple -- however, they definately do NOT follow a standard economic model -- what kind of company hires a soda pop marketer to run a computer company.
Here's my past experience with companies that had no competition either failing or getting out of the home computer market.
Commodore, Atari, Coleco, Amstrad, TI, Timex/Sinclair, Kaypro, Osbourne, Acorn, Apollo, Casio, Mattel, NeXT, Olivetti, Tandy (*), Zenith, etc (did I miss any?).
Past experience speaks for itself; your company has greater than 16-1 odds of failing without competition.
Hope that clears it up.
(*) - Gave up after only making a few PC clones. Really killed themselves with the TRaSh-80.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
My bad. Didn't realize you didn't edit the title. Take this as my apology. Sorry again!
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Be able to upgrade kernel without worrying if it will break their video card drivers. See 4KSTACK.
:wq
it certainly sounds like I would like it. It describes a situation much closer to what I had in mind for computing. Interesting, so I guess it was more widespread and worked on more. Oh well. Funny unix and plan 9 both came from AT&T, isn't it?
Score: -1, Queerbait (Am I rite?)
I've read most of the nVidia discussions, and I've never heard of that, so lose the tone. Also, earlier today I stumbled across this in the Mesa FAQ; apparently in 1999 SGI opened up a sample OpenGL implementation. (Not that I'm sure this is the same thing you're talking about.)
Actually, it's not surprising Plan 9 came from AT&T. Plan 9 was AT&T's response to the shift from huge time-sharing systems to personal computer networks. Unix was designed for time sharing systems and its architecture really was not suited well for the PC revolution. Unfortunately, by the time Plan 9 started to be remotely usable, Unix vendors (and Linux) had gotten Unix ported well enough to PCs and had created a number of bolt-on networking technologies that did the things companies needed.
Plan 9 was a much more elegant fit for the PC environment (for companies), but it was too much of a revolution in both hardware and software system design and Unix was able to do the job well enough. Thus, Unix type systems have blown Plan 9 away in practical usefulness, despite an inferior architecture.
The preceding comments reflect the author's personal opinion and are public domain, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
That's what happened with ATI Radeon. People who prefer a GPL, accelerated video card can perfectly use ATI Radeon = 9200 with a FLOSS Linux driver. :).
Wikileaks, no DNS
If Nvidia go open source with their drivers cheating in benchmarks will be alot more dificult with all the peir reviews. personally I think they are retarded anyway. Typicall self obsessed corperate thinking. Really childish anyways. I would rather have them spend more r & d on developing hardware than waisting money on dodgey closed source drivers