[FreeBSD-Announce] FreeBSD 12.0 end-of-life

[Valeri Galtsev]

On 2020-02-21 09:09, Polytropon wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Feb 2020 10:14:09 +0100, Tomasz CEDRO wrote:
>> This is exactly the reason why I have switched from nVidia to AMD
>> RADEON and planning no return!!
>>
>> Because nVidia does not provide documentation nor support to
>> Open-Source, only binary blobs, you start to think that their drivers
>> are the best because "they just work"^TM. Nothing more misleading!
>>
>> nVidia seems to have no respect in the Open-Source community.

Indeed, Timasz, and the don't deserve any respect, see my comment below.

>> I was
>> also astonished with that being their 20 years long loyal customer.
>>
>> When you look at the true Open-Source drivers, you will notice they
>> are poor and you cannot really do anything more with nVidia than just
>> display.

There is fundamental reason for that. Nvidia does not disclose/publish 
sufficient information about their chipsets. Therefore, there is no 
decent way for open source programmers to write good driver (that will 
account for framebuffer layout and variety of other internal things). 
Hence, crappy open source drivers covering only generic functionality.

To the contrary (in the past at least), ATI (bough out by AMD, and still 
continuing similar attitude under the hood of AMD as I observe) was 
publishing sufficient information about their cipsets. Hence, great open 
source drivers were always available for ATI video chips. And no matter 
how much the main Linux crowd was praising Nvidia, I always was a rebel 
praising my lifesaver: ATI (and disliking Nvidia to tell it in the 
mildest words).

<rant>
To mention one more thing about Nvidia, just in general, not related to 
anything here. Macbook Pro 15 inch by Apple at some point was coming 
with discrete Nvidia chip. There were was at least one model that had 
these Nvidia chips with the bug in silicon, which was discovered with 
release of next MacOS version. All those machines with bad Nvidia chips 
were stuck with older system, and Apple (there they deserved my extra 
respect!) started program to replace all these machines with bad Nvidia 
chip for free. But the program was stopped really quick, and my guess 
is: because Nvidia (the guilty party in my book) refused to carry their 
share of financial burden in replacing bad hardware. Right there Apple 
switched away from Nvidia, to ATI (AMD) video chips. For good, at least 
as I observe so far.
</rant>

> 
> Exactly my impression. While there are several (I think, 3)
> open source nVidia drivers, all of them have problems. Some
> just offer 3D graphics, others won't work in 64 bit OS mode,
> and others just freeze when being loaded. The binary blob is
> the only way to get proper 3D support.
> 
> 
> 
>> Open-Source RADEON drivers in general are by some considered even
>> better than binary blobs provided by AMD.
> 
> Interesting. This seems to be a "ride back to the past" where
> ATI (which was the typical brand name of the Radeon-type GPUs
> at that time) was always superior to nVidia: 3D support out of
> the box, with the standard drivers included with X. Then there
> was a time where nVidia was considered better than ATI / AMD
> (again, judging from the binary blob driver!), and today, AMD
> using the open source drivers seems to be the way to go.
> 

ATI was always the way to go for me.

Valeri

> 
> 
>> Here comes the development of DRM layer that is something brand new in
>> FreeBSD that will support all new GPU in a truly Open-Source fashion
>> (but hey where does that firmware comes from??).
> 
> Don't ask the firmware question. Don't ask _any_ questions
> going below the visibility level. ;-)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 
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Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
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