Video Card for FreeBSD 9.0 (RC2) AMD64
Matt Dawson
matt at chronos.org.uk
Tue Dec 13 12:54:54 UTC 2011
On Monday 12 Dec 2011 19:22:55 Dieter BSD wrote:
> Full support requires full documentation or full
> reverse-engineering. nVidia is openly hostile towards FLOSS, I
> don't expect any documentation from them in the forseeable future.
> AMD/ATI is working on documenting their chips, but seems to be
> concentrating on features for games, and never getting around to
> UVD (video decode) or GPGPU, etc. The only fully documented card
> I know of is the Open Graphics Project's OGP-D1, which is a PCI-X
> FPGA development card. It has linux drivers, but I suspect it
> doesn't have support in BSD.
Just a quick comment on this: One of the reasons I choose FreeBSD over
$OTHER_OS is that a lot of us are remarkably free of political
encumbrance when we're trying to get things working, ergo the nVidia
binary blob and the support from nVidia on the forums is generally
accepted as a best-effort endeavour.
When you're sitting in the living room setting up and HTPC with SWMBO
looking on and making clicking noises and muttering things like "the
XBox can already do this stuff" because of your dislike of decisions
being imposed by large corporations, the ability to cd
/usr/ports/x11/nvidia-driver && make config && make && make install to
get something that Just Works [TM] rather than trying to get around
other people's political views can be the difference between violent
rejection and passive acceptance.
There are reasons why nVidia cannot release specifications,
particularly on their PureVideo technology, which happen to be the
same reasons AMD can't release theirs: They don't fully own those
technologies. As it stands, I'm resigned to trading off full freedom
of code for functionality. The important part, the interface between
the kernel and the blob, is fully open in that you can see what passes
between the two and ensure there's nothing freedom and privacy
threatening going on.
Idealism is all well and good, but general acceptance in the real
world requires a certain amount of compromise. There's another example
right in our kernel: The Highpoint RocketRAID (hptrr(4)) driver has a
closed binary component. It's right there in the man page for all to
see.
--
Matt Dawson
MTD15-RIPE
matt at chronos.org.uk
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