amd64 platform newbie -- what video card for x11?

[Roland Smith]

On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 12:32:16AM -0500, Isaac Mushinsky wrote:

> You seem to be patient indeed, is there any indication that nvidia will ever 
> release an amd64 driver? 

IIRC, NVidia has requested some changes to the FreeBSD kernel. I'm not
sure if or when those will be implemented. Maybe ask the hackers@ list.

IMHO this is the wrong way to go about things. Binary only drivers can
be a PITA. The FreeBSD team cannot debug or support them. Only the
vendors can. And for them, FreeBSD-amd64 must be the niche of a niche
market. If kernel internal interfaces change, you'll have to wait until
a new driver is released by the vendor.

I suspect that most binary drivers are recompiled windows drivers with a
FreeBSD wrapper. Given the average quality of windows driver, the
question is do you want something like that in your kernel?

> Google shows years of empty rallying and petitions. 
> Very much like the adobe/flash9 situation. It seems that ATI cards have 
> better support now.

Since ATI was acquired by AMD, they seem to have begun releasing more
documentation.  For more information check the Xorg/freedesktop websites
and mailing lists.

It seems that ATI and Intel are now the best wrt releasing documentation
so that free/open source drivers can be written.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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