NetBSD

[teK]

How about a driver for NetBSD? I'd really appreciate that.

Is there anyone running the FreeBSD drivers on NetBSD?
And if this is possible, could you give me a link to a howto?
I also used the forums search function but no real results for NetBSD.
X without 3D Acceleration sucks. :|


thx

[teK]

NO statements?
Noone else wishing to get into the pleasures of having a NVIDIA driver for NetBSD? :\

[Harvey Pooka]

I found this: http://cubidou.nerim.net/. It looks outdated. Maybe something newer exists in packages (or ports?) on NetBSD.

[akoo]

Well when nVidia has officialy support (obsolete) for FreeBSD only, then I guess no. It`s shame, `cose *BSDs are such a great systems, but then the kernels of Free/Net/OpenBSD are slightly diferent. Anyhow nv should realise that the more OS they support the better for them. Brings more customers. Friend of mine just both nvidia quadro and it just doesn`t work under BSD!!! (with GLX ofcourse) So he runs blender at slackware Linux and works at FreeBSD. Same my case with FX-5200. Solution: either use old hw or don`t use acceleration.

NVIDIA *BSD USERS ARE HUNGRY !!!!!!! IT`S LOVELY THAT YOU SO NICELY SUPPORT LINUX, BUT THERE ARE OTHER *NIXS ASWELL.

[bilu]

A petition should be organized for NVIDIA 3D drivers for NetBSD, I'll see what I can do.

[LubosD]

Well - think like nVidia. How many users do use NetBSD?

[bilu]

Well, one way or another, 3D will find its way into NetBSD :)

Tonnerre's project: porting DRI to NetBSD
http://users.thundrix.ch/~tonnerre/kernel/netbsd/directrendering.html

Discussion about it at the NetBSD tech-kern mailing list
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.os.netbsd.devel.kernel/14915

DRI supported hardware status:
http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/Status?action=highlight&value=CategoryHardware

And what can be done with NVIDIA hardware:
http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/nVidia?action=highlight&value=CategoryHardware

"UtahGLX also has basic support for nVidia Riva / TNT / GeForce for XFree86 3.3 and 4.0. Someone should port this to DRI."

So if someone ports UtahGLX NVIDIA support to DRI while Michael and Tonnerre port DRI to NetBSD, we're done :)

But if UtahGLX support gets ported to DRI then all other OSes will benefit, and the new DRI driver will be improved to a point we won't need NVIDIA closed-source drivers anymore. Open-source motivation can make wonders, remember Gnome was born because of the former QT license (QT is the main widget library of KDE, it's GPL now).

If it doesn't get ported, well, DRI found it's way into NetBSD anyway, and NetBSD users will look for ATI instead of NVIDIA :)

Right now there are NetBSD users who dual-boot into another OS just to get NVIDIA 3D support. If ATI gets supported through DRI I'm sure they'll rather upgrade to ATI than to dual-boot just for 3D.

So, NVIDIA, if you want to release a driver for NetBSD, you better do it now, before an open-source driver appears or NetBSD users start looking for ATI for every platform that supports PCI and AGP.

Bruno

[LubosD]

I am not against NetBSD but I think it wont hurt nVidia if NetBSD users use ATI...

Are there any native OpenGL games for NetBSD?

[bilu]

It seems we can already have 3D under NetBSD using NVIDIA! :dance:

http://utah-glx.sourceforge.net/faq.html#AEN349
"We've had reports of the driver working on alpha, ppc, and the x86 family of processors. It should be workable on any unix-like environment that runs XFree86."

It's slower than DRI but it doesn't depend on the OS, just X.

http://utah-glx.sourceforge.net/

http://www.freebsdforums.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2206&highlight=utah

"I just tested the linux quake 3 binary under NetBSD on a PII-400. It's running at ~40 fps in 1024x768x16."

It's more compatible, but slower:

http://utah-glx.sourceforge.net/faq.html#AEN9
"[...]the DRI modules only support hardware acceleration for "direct" clients, whereas Utah-GLX only has "indirect" client support. On the one hand, this means that Utah-GLX is slower. But on the bright side, this means it is more compatible."

http://www.freebsdforums.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=36&perpage=15&highlight=utah&pagenumber=2

"I have a Geforce DDR in my old system and I get about 25 FPS in Q3 with Utah GLX. On my new box, I have a G450 with DRI and can pull 40 FPS. DRI is cool :-) "


Bruno

[bilu]

I am not against NetBSD but I think it wont hurt nVidia if NetBSD users use ATI...

Are there any native OpenGL games for NetBSD?

With Linux emulation NetBSD can be as gaming-capable as FreeBSD in terms of popular closed-source games.

http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/compat.html
http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?compat_linux++NetBSD-current

As for open-source games, can look here for already available packages, and I'm sure this list will increase when DRI is available:

ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/pkgsrc/games/README.html

pkgsrc is an incredible package manager, supported in all NetBSD architectures but also in other OSes :

http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/#in-tree-ports
http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/software/packages.html#platforms


Bruno

[energyman76b]

Hi,
please be patient with nvidia.

It does hardly be profitable to spport the few nvidia-users (and without some big costumers demanding drivers there would be none for linux too), and netbsd is even a smaller basis...

maybe as soon as netbsd is used by some hollywood studios...

[bilu]

Hi,
please be patient with nvidia.

It does hardly be profitable to spport the few nvidia-users (and without some big costumers demanding drivers there would be none for linux too), and netbsd is even a smaller basis...

maybe as soon as netbsd is used by some hollywood studios...

NetBSD has even better potential for embedded. Think about game consoles.
The BSD license is friendlier for manufacturers who want to be able to merge code when needed without fearing for their trade secrets.

Playstation Portable license mentions NetBSD code
http://www.scei.co.jp/psp-license/pspnet.txt

Known products based on NetBSD, not updated
http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/products.html

White Paper: Linux or BSD: Which Unix is Best for Embedded Applications?
http://www.wasabisystems.com/pdfs/Linux_or_BSD.pdf

And if you search for "NetBSD code" here:
http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/blog.html

you'll find that QNX, Playstation Portable, Novell Groupwise and the PS2 Game "XIII" contain NetBSD code.



Bruno

[energyman76b]

Hi,
'embedded' is totally and completly different from 'rendering farms'

Even if netbsd is nice for ovens, washing machines and dryers, what does that say about its usefullness as a graphics-workstation?

also, 'embedded' products, like freezer-control, microwave-ovens, or set-top boxes usually do not need any graphics capability execept displaying some numbers on small lcds.
So, when NetBSD is first choice for embedded products, there are even less reasons, to give it great graphics capabilities...

Besides the 'friendly' bsd-license also means, that if you help BSD, all you competitors will have advantages.. and do not have to give anything back.

BSD is a scientific license.. made to make it able to built upon, and the GPL was made, to keep free, what is made free.

Do you see the difference?


EDIT:

game consoles are totally different.. but ever seen one with net-bsd?
I have not, ans there will bne some reasons, why nobody uses it for gc.. maybe, because it is almost as slow, as openbsd? Or almost as friendly?)

[bilu]

I was speaking about how NetBSD portable code and friendly license has brought their code to both hardware and software. Of course I didn't meant for a gaming console to use NetBSD as a whole, but they can take code and use it, and so they've done mostly with its TCP/IP stack.

Of course an OS is more than just its TCP/IP stack, I just meant to show you that the NetBSD user base *for the code* is not that small.

As of the userbase *for the OS*, which is the one that matters most in terms of getting support from NVIDIA, it's smaller but has been growing well after NetBSD 2.0 .

Performance is better than FreeBSD 5.x for single-processor machines and is more considered this days as a desktop alternative than ever before.

But if the point of NVIDIA support for Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris is "rendering farms", then I understand why NetBSD isn't supported. SMP works better in FreeBSD than in NetBSD, and other possible rendering farm architectures like MIPS already have their own graphic boards (SGI).

Bruno

[energyman76b]

Hi,

hm,
> Performance is better than FreeBSD 5.x for single-processor machines and is more considered this days as a desktop alternative than ever before.

too bad, that single-processor (or more correctly single-core machines) are going away ;)

but saince I will not be able to buy a 'modern' computer anytime, I m,ight try netbsd... it can not be worse than obsd ;)

[bilu]

Hi,

too bad, that single-processor (or more correctly single-core machines) are going away ;)

but saince I will not be able to buy a 'modern' computer anytime, I m,ight try netbsd... it can not be worse than obsd ;)

This may help your decision ;)

Benchmark Comparison of NetBSD 2.0 and FreeBSD 5.3
http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/gmcgarry/

Real world benchmark between NetBSD 2.0, OpenBSD 3.6 and Fedora Core 3
http://bsd.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=135240&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&tid=190&mode=thread&cid=11319773

Xen benchmark between NetBSD and Linux
http://users.piuha.net/martti/comp/xendom0/xendom0.html

Another comparison between FreeBSD and NetBSD
http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/blog.html#20050327_1403

Porting full NetBSD to 64-bit Opteron took only two days
http://www.bsdnewsletter.com/2003/04/Outside78.html



Bruno

[energyman76b]

Hi,
remember this?
http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/

I do... so.. I know that nbsd is faster than obsd (and that is nice.. obsd is so slow, you can FEEL the crawling ;) )
but I didn't knew, that it became faster than fbsd.. nice done folks... hm, only boot floppies? thats bad.. hmhm.. *lookfurther*



Edit: found them..

[bilu]

I've also posted a thread at freebsdforums.org about this, may help to gather info as development goes.

3D support under NetBSD
http://www.freebsdforums.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=32267

About NetBSD install CDs:
http://www.netbsd.org/mirrors/#iso
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/iso/2.0.2/i386cd.iso.torrent

Bruno

[ciruz]

I'm also for a NetBSD driver.
If someone from NVidia reads this:
You only need to port the kernel module and recompile the XServer-Modul. That way, you will get a few thousand new customers. Same for OpenBSD. I'm sure that most of the NetBSD users will buy an NVidia card if you are faster releasing one than ATI. It's very likely that the ATI drivers are running soon on NetBSD and a little later on OpenBSD, too (I guess OpenBSD will port DRI from NetBSD). Adding the number of users of NetBSD and OpenBSD, then it's a few hundred thousands. If only 10% buy a good NVidia card, for example one of the 6800 series, than wouldn't that be worth it?