Re:Was OpenBSD really first with OSS nvidia ethern
on
The SLI Godfather
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· Score: 1
I was wrong about OpenBSD beeing first out.
Re:I disagree (but you're right)
on
The SLI Godfather
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The sad thing that NDA/binaryblobs acceptance seems to be representative of the "Linux culture". One day we are going to wake to the fact we cannot run Linux without binary blobs, even for basic hardware like a NIC. The NVIDIA binary blobs for the nForce MCP Networking Adapter is an example of this trend.
That's a red herring. Just because the Linux culture encourages the release of hardware specs, it does not follow that any hardware maker must release those specs.
So why does not Linux developers support OpenBSD efforts to get hardware docs? The Linux culture, sadly, seems to be to accept documentation under NDA (for instance, UltraSparc III support) and write obfuscated "open source" drivers, or think the binary blobs are fine.
NVidia will provide drivers for the right price. Maybe a lot more for source code too. Maybe never if the requirement is that the drivers be licensed under a so-called Free license. But there is no reason to expect that every hardware manufacturer is going to bend over backwards for a niche OS.
We're asking for hardware documentation, not binary blobs.
There really isn't a conspiracy to keep drivers out of FreeBSD or Linux or whatever niche OS you're running. The only question is who is going to pay for those drivers. If you need it the most, you will pay for it. NVidia *needs* Windows drivers, so they pay for it themselves. Try getting NVidia to release drivers for Symbian. It's never going to happen without a wad of cash.
NVidia does not even release any hardware documentation for any of their many chipsets. So any open source driver for NVidia hardware has to be reverse engineered, but the Linux crowd seems to prefer binary blobs.
In addition to the various things mentioned in the article, I feel that another topic for pondering is the possibility that SLI may, or may not, ever see the official light of day under FreeBSD. While NVIDIA's code is similar between Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD, there seems to be no corporate customer at this point -- or even the appropriate lobbying for a free port.
Here you see what happens when only binary blobs are available. At some stage even your old hardware will stop working because the manufacturer will not provide updated binary blobs drivers.
NVIDIA is anti-open source. They will happily peddle some binary blobs for some archs (i386) and some OS, but refuse to give any hardware documentation or even tell the name of their various chipsets.
As long as the Linux/FreeBSD crowd accepts binary blobs in order to get their hardware to work, then NVIDIA will happily continue to only handout binary blobs.
This driver is a reimplementation of the NVIDIA supported Linux nvnet driver and uses the same closed source API library to access the underly- ing hardware. There is currently no programming documentation available for this device, and therefore little is known about the internal archi- tecture of the MAC engine itself.
And this is just a NIC? What's so secret about that? And this is acceptable?
The current administration seems to make just about everything it can closed to public scrutiny; in this case, it's even easier than usual because they can claim "it's against terrorists / fer the children!!!"
The secrecy of this administration is unprecented, and so are their efforts to give the President unchecked powers.
The kind of mind that takes a keen interest in government and politics and the kind of mind that has a strong interest in computers and technology typically do not mix.
That might be true of 15 year olds living with Mom, but some of us are adults that do care how a country a governed.
Kernel 2.4 to 2.6 was a pretty big jump in speed. I just upgraded to the latest KDE and a bunch of other updates, and got another performance jump. Once they shake the bugs out of the Radeon drivers for X.org, I'll get accelerated X, and another big speed boost.
Note that the KDE has put work into faster startup/loading, and this is not a Linux thing.
So are the editors saying this isn't some legitimate, hard-working businessman just trying to make a buck on the internet? Yeah! Let him rot for all I care.
Yeah, he does not have Republican connections like former Enron executives. He forgot to make some "donations", tax deductible, of course.
Is it just me, or is the term "sysadmin toolbox" a bit off?
Sure, torsmo and root-tail are great at monitoring your computer, but calling ImageMagick a sysadmin tool sounds kinda strange to me.
This is the Linux section after all. Perhaps the BSD section is more suited for real admins? *ducks*
The issue is that the DoD is very serious about controlling the amount of access foreigners have to their infrastructure and information on that infrastructure. I have it on very good authority that some DoD divisions are moving away (at a cautious rate) from Microsoft technologies precisely due to their difficulty in avoiding having their tech support calls routed outside the US. However, this is probably all I can say on this board.
Yeah, no kidding. Many foreigners are serious about this as well, but when they try to do something about it, there are huge cries about "free" and "fair" trade from USA and demands for sanctions.
Modern graphics cards can be used to bypass security measures as an unprivileged user (reading kernel memory, say). Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD
reminded users how modern X works:
I would like to educate people of something which many are not aware
of -- how X works on a modern machine.
Some of our architectures use a tricky and horrid thing to allow X to
run. This is due to modern PC video card architecture containing a
large quantity of PURE EVIL. To get around this evil the X developers
have done some rather expedient things, such as directly accessing the
cards via IO registers, directly from userland. It is hard to see how
they could have done other -- that is how much evil the cards contain.
Most operating systems make accessing these cards trivially easy for X
to do this, but OpenBSD creates a small security barrier through the
use of an "aperture driver", called xf86(4) (...)
Don't use a relatively "proprietary" crypto then. By proprietary, I mean "highly dependent on the running kernel and system". Linux kernel encryption is tough as it's changing regularly. I've avoided it.
You could also say "shoddy and badly engineered code" that put users data at risk. This reminds me why I stopped using Linux and started using OpenBSD a few years ago.
Invariably, a lot of the comments to this story are going to commend the team on the incredibly speed with which they've released a patch, and there'll probably be some comments comparing it to closed software. Yet another victory for the open source model!
Any OS vendor, be it open sourced or not, would very quickly patch a security hole of this magnitude. Anyone claiming this as a "victory for open source model" does not know what they are talking about.
I believe Breezy was released in October, so for five months install logs have been sitting, world-readable, often with the root password. Surely in that time someone well less savoury motives did a simple grep of an install looking for the most trivial of faults.
Seems that the developers/support/whatever seldom reads the install log, if ever, or the very big security hole would have been noticed earlier. If noone reads it for trouble shooting, what is the point of the install log? This whole episode is worrisome, from a security point of view. If they make this type of error, what else is there?
So you're boycotting PlayStation-exclusive franchises, right? So what's the big-ball-of-garbage game that you substitute for Katamari Damacy (only on PS2), We Love Katamari (only on PS2), and Me and My Katamari (only on PSP)?
I don't play console games.
Consumers will exert as much control over their TVs as they now have over their Web browsers, ordering from a limitless menu of programming. With a few clicks of the remote control, viewers will be able not only to watch old movie classics, but to open video and audio connections to far-flung family members, so they can view shows (say, Duke basketball) and talk to each other as though they were all sitting in the same room.
The dude writing the article should not should not just copy/paste something produced by Cisco market department. The remote controll as it is today is quite simply not suited for this expanded functionality, and I like my remote control to be small and not a big keyboard.
This will like set an important precedent w.r.t. rootkits and other commercial malware (Starforce anyone?). I only hope the result will be good for the customer and not the corporations. If Sony don't get the punishment they deserve for this, everyone else will jump on the bandwagon.
I avoid buying Sony products, unless the product is substansially better than the competition. If more people buy fewer Sony products, you can be sure that Sony execs will take notice. So their CD stunt had effect spilling into other Sony divisions, like sales of TV sets.
Few power supplies much better than 80% efficiency, so with a 1KW PSU you can expect 800 W that is usable. The Opteron 870 is rated as max 95W, so four of them gives approximately 400W. A few SCSI hard disks that may use as much as 30W at startup, much memory, lots of cooling, and whatever the motherboard itself consumes, and we have easily another 100W. While a 1KW PSU seems much, it does not seem excessive.
Well ID is also getting money and research you know.
Yeah sure, when they are able to put together a scientific theory, which they with impressive consistency fail to do. We all know that we have a reborn former alcoholic in charge of the pushing the Button, and not even the Stalinist was that proficient in lies that the current administration is. Sad to say, Stalin was an amateur......
For crying out loud, the original article spells "Claus" correctly. Where'd the extraneous "e" come from?:P
Someone watching to many "LA Law or something" episodes and confusing the term clause (legal) with Claus (name). But hey, better this than believing in "Intelligent Design". But perhaps it's just a symptom of a common disease: malicious ignorance.
Re:The VAX port stopped working a long time ago
on
NetBSD v3.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
In other words, it runs on 90% of their users' computers, and the developer time on those architectures was well-spent. Sorry, but pandering to hobbyist users of obscure hardware (yes, today it is) is a waste. In a world of finite resources, tasks must be prioritized.
How kind of you tell the developers what to develop and prioritize on something they do for free.
By releasing first for x86, the NetBSD devs demonstrate their sanity by working on the software that would benefit the most users. Today, VAX doesn't matter, so why should they support it at all?
I got news for you: Developers work on certain architectures because they want to.
Slashdot Mirror
What is this RTFM you are talking about?
I was wrong about OpenBSD beeing first out.
The sad thing that NDA/binaryblobs acceptance seems to be representative of the "Linux culture". One day we are going to wake to the fact we cannot run Linux without binary blobs, even for basic hardware like a NIC. The NVIDIA binary blobs for the nForce MCP Networking Adapter is an example of this trend.
So why does not Linux developers support OpenBSD efforts to get hardware docs? The Linux culture, sadly, seems to be to accept documentation under NDA (for instance, UltraSparc III support) and write obfuscated "open source" drivers, or think the binary blobs are fine.
NVidia will provide drivers for the right price. Maybe a lot more for source code too. Maybe never if the requirement is that the drivers be licensed under a so-called Free license. But there is no reason to expect that every hardware manufacturer is going to bend over backwards for a niche OS.
We're asking for hardware documentation, not binary blobs.
NVidia does not even release any hardware documentation for any of their many chipsets. So any open source driver for NVidia hardware has to be reverse engineered, but the Linux crowd seems to prefer binary blobs.
Here you see what happens when only binary blobs are available. At some stage even your old hardware will stop working because the manufacturer will not provide updated binary blobs drivers.
NVIDIA is anti-open source. They will happily peddle some binary blobs for some archs (i386) and some OS, but refuse to give any hardware documentation or even tell the name of their various chipsets.
As long as the Linux/FreeBSD crowd accepts binary blobs in order to get their hardware to work, then NVIDIA will happily continue to only handout binary blobs.
Have a look at the FreeBSD nve (NVIDIA nForce MCP Networking Adapter device driver) driver:
And this is just a NIC? What's so secret about that? And this is acceptable?
Have a look at what OpenBSD does: Reverse engineer and offer the first open source driver nfe (NVIDIA nForce MCP Ethernet driver)
[/rant]
The secrecy of this administration is unprecented, and so are their efforts to give the President unchecked powers.
That might be true of 15 year olds living with Mom, but some of us are adults that do care how a country a governed.
Note that the KDE has put work into faster startup/loading, and this is not a Linux thing.
Yeah, he does not have Republican connections like former Enron executives. He forgot to make some "donations", tax deductible, of course.
Hmm, you have recently been stationed in Iraq?
This is the Linux section after all. Perhaps the BSD section is more suited for real admins? *ducks*
Yeah, no kidding. Many foreigners are serious about this as well, but when they try to do something about it, there are huge cries about "free" and "fair" trade from USA and demands for sanctions.
You could also say "shoddy and badly engineered code" that put users data at risk. This reminds me why I stopped using Linux and started using OpenBSD a few years ago.
Any OS vendor, be it open sourced or not, would very quickly patch a security hole of this magnitude. Anyone claiming this as a "victory for open source model" does not know what they are talking about.
I believe Breezy was released in October, so for five months install logs have been sitting, world-readable, often with the root password. Surely in that time someone well less savoury motives did a simple grep of an install looking for the most trivial of faults.
Seems that the developers/support/whatever seldom reads the install log, if ever, or the very big security hole would have been noticed earlier. If noone reads it for trouble shooting, what is the point of the install log? This whole episode is worrisome, from a security point of view. If they make this type of error, what else is there?
So you're boycotting PlayStation-exclusive franchises, right? So what's the big-ball-of-garbage game that you substitute for Katamari Damacy (only on PS2), We Love Katamari (only on PS2), and Me and My Katamari (only on PSP)? I don't play console games.
The dude writing the article should not should not just copy/paste something produced by Cisco market department. The remote controll as it is today is quite simply not suited for this expanded functionality, and I like my remote control to be small and not a big keyboard.
I avoid buying Sony products, unless the product is substansially better than the competition. If more people buy fewer Sony products, you can be sure that Sony execs will take notice. So their CD stunt had effect spilling into other Sony divisions, like sales of TV sets.
Few power supplies much better than 80% efficiency, so with a 1KW PSU you can expect 800 W that is usable. The Opteron 870 is rated as max 95W, so four of them gives approximately 400W. A few SCSI hard disks that may use as much as 30W at startup, much memory, lots of cooling, and whatever the motherboard itself consumes, and we have easily another 100W. While a 1KW PSU seems much, it does not seem excessive.
Yeah sure, when they are able to put together a scientific theory, which they with impressive consistency fail to do. We all know that we have a reborn former alcoholic in charge of the pushing the Button, and not even the Stalinist was that proficient in lies that the current administration is. Sad to say, Stalin was an amateur......
Someone watching to many "LA Law or something" episodes and confusing the term clause (legal) with Claus (name). But hey, better this than believing in "Intelligent Design". But perhaps it's just a symptom of a common disease: malicious ignorance.
How kind of you tell the developers what to develop and prioritize on something they do for free.
By releasing first for x86, the NetBSD devs demonstrate their sanity by working on the software that would benefit the most users. Today, VAX doesn't matter, so why should they support it at all?
I got news for you: Developers work on certain architectures because they want to.
Don't you know that the school board of Kansas has decided that this will be done next year?
I thought the mail client Evolution was named "Scientific Achievement", until I got past the headline...