X.org 7.3

[alexdupre]

When will it be released a driver compiled for Xorg 7.3 (Video ABI 2.0) ?

[kmoore134]

Zander, any news on this? We are about ready to release PC-BSD 1.4 here, and now the NVIDIA driver is broken :(

[freeDrivers]

Maybe the best fix is to buy an ATI card now that it's drivers are open source !

Nvidia has not released any driver update in 4 months !!

[zander]

I expect an updated set of NVIDIA FreeBSD graphics driver releases (100.14.xx and legacy) with Xorg 7.3 compatibility to become available very soon. In the meantime, you can use the -ignoreABI option and use older drivers if you don't use COMPOSITE.

[cervo]

When is the driver released?
I need it very mush.

[dannato]

Hi all,
any news about?


Regards

[Jandrese]

So the unofficial word is that -ignoreABI is fine as long as you don't use the COMPOSITE extension?

[SirDice]

-ignoreABI works for me :)

[kgish]

-ignoreABI does NOT works for me :(

[4th_dimension]

any situation changes?
any news about legacy driver?
some fresh info, plz.

[dannato]

mmm
on FreeBSD CURRENT if i launch glxgear or some opengl application, my motherboard start beeping and system freeze.
IgnoreABI is on.
(Mobo A8N Sli Premium - Geffo 7800 GXT)

If i use nv driver instead of nvidia no probs.

On FreeBSD 6.2 looklike no problem but of course i cannot use Composite and have to ignoreABI.

So:
1 - I always use Composite and spent a lot of money for that Geffo :d
2 - I cannot play wine games anymore like that :| and i want use opengl for many many other apps.

I know "i break balls" as we say in Italy but some infos to know about new driver fix date release will be nice.


Thanks & Regards

[badger101101]

Zander, it's good to hear that updated drivers for Xorg 7.3 are forthcoming. With that being said, several weeks have past since you made the announcement and it would be nice to get a feel for how far out they really are (days, weeks, months?)

Thanks again.

[cervo]

Zander, could I have any news of new driver?

Best regards.

[Ravna]

ignore ABI ? Don't use composite ?
No transparency for us 'exotic' BSD users, no Beryl, no Compiz, no nothing but 1980ish standards ?
We're stuck with plain old X, despite having forked over + 600 $ for our 8800s ?
Are u kidding me ?
Do u want us to join M$ ? I'd rather buy an ATI card !
Let's be real, XP isn't going to change, and MS shot themselves in the leg with Vista.
Why bother about Vista ? DirectX 10 isn't used by anything anyway.
Just forget Vista unless they release SP1 - K ?

XP drivers are fine as they are.
My moms XP ran with Nvidia drivers of last year.
I installed Blazing Angels - the last and most demanding Ubisoft Flight Sim.
Then I ran benchmarks.
Then I upgraded the Nvidia driver to the latest.
Then I ran benchmarks.
Do you think there was a little, teensy weensy, gain in performance ?
NOPE ! Absolutely none whatsoever.
Again, why bother ?
Most Windows users don't upgrade their drivers anyway.
They just stick with what came with their PC.
Automatic updates is all they've got.

Most Linux users rely on packages, supplied by their vendors.
They just click on 'update packages' and that's it.

Your only 'REAL' audience are BSD users.
They raise matters of importance - they don't need advice about cicking an install button . .
They provide useful feedback, instead of asking stupid questions.
Don't disappoint them.
Any new driver should be released for BSD first.

[lsantagostini]

I have a 8500GT geffo.

But i feel like a stupid becouse there is no driver with ABI 2.0 support.
So i cant play with *GL*, compiz-fusion, beryl, emerald, and one of my motivations to buy this graphics card was, they have a driver for FreeBSD wich is OpenGl cappable
I expect that the new driver comes with ABI 2.0 support. in the meanwhile ill use MICRO$OFT eXPerience.
Lets get loud people maybe this guys make great stuff for us.

Best Regards.
Leonardo

[badger101101]

Being "loud" and voicing your dissatisfaction is one thing, but being rude and obnoxious won't speed anything up.

Zander has mentioned that updated drivers with support for Xorg 7.3 (ABI 2.0) are going to be released soon. My only complaint is that "soon" is a very vague term and could mean anything from a few hours to a few months.

Please don't leave us hanging much longer nVidia. This is really putting a damper on my GL development.

[abonomat]

It is possible to answer a simple question? When at last there will be a driver for FreeBSD 6.2?!! You have already provided all exotic, even under Solaris the driver 100.14.19 has appeared, and for FreeBSD all is not present and not present. Us some tens thousand person only officially (though on this forum also you will not tell) and it only desktop-users on FreeBSD. Will announce your problems and community will try to help you. We not for that have refused from ATI in favour of nVidia that months to wait (at me 7900GT).

[Chronos_]

Being "loud" and voicing your dissatisfaction is one thing, but being rude and obnoxious won't speed anything up.

Seconded. As for time frames, as any competent programmer will tell you, sticking a deadline on a piece of code is something only a manager does, and then only a manager with no coding background. I doubt Zander will commit to a time frame simply because he can't. There are no hard and fast rules from which to calculate such a promise and it makes a company look silly when the date slips (see Microsoft and Vista for just how silly, especially when that slippage starts making you drop features and quality to get it RTM).

Don't forget, aside from the ABI bump, there is also the GLX issue that shows up when running composite and damage extensions, which is just a single issue that I'm aware of and have verified for myself, so there is probably extra work to be done to bring the FreeBSD driver to feature parity with the other platforms. It's not a case of nVidia and Zander not caring. Quite the contrary.

No, I'm not associated with nVidia in any way. I've just thought about the xorg-7.3 upgrade logically. Let me go through my reasoning:

I have a nVidia graphics card (or five), 3D works fine and I can play Doom3 (if I wanted to, which I don't. I use it to benchmark graphics cards with "linux-doom3 timedemo demo1") in xorg 7.2;
Xorg in the ports has been updated to 7.3;
The current nVidia driver doesn't support 7.3's ABI;
The Xorg 7.3 input modules are causing people problems, even with other graphics hardware;
portaudit -Fda is complaining at me for not upgrading firefox et al.

What do I do? Do I:

Do a portupgrade -a anyway and bitch when it doesn't work, even when I knew perfectly well that 7.3 and 100.14.11 are incompatible?
Leave my ports tree alone and risk vulnerabilities until the driver is updated and then bitch when I get rooted?
pkg_glob -R xorg, stick those packages (which don't appear in VuXML and are, therefore, quite safe for now) in the HOLD_PKGS stanza of pkgtools.conf then csup & portupgrade to get the fixes for vulnerabilities and wait for both the driver and the input problems to be rectified?

Well, the first one is silly. I'm going to end up with a knackered system that is less use than it was before and it would be my own damned fault. The second one is a little dangerous, especially with firefox being one of the vulnerable packages. The third option seems to me to be the only sensible choice so the third option is the one I went with. I haven't regretted it yet.

References:
HOLD_PKGS: man 5 pkgtools.conf and the default pkgtools.conf, usually in /usr/local/etc/, FreeBSD 6.2-p8 20071005 (c) The FreeBSD Project, Akinori Musha
pkg_glob -R xorg: man 1 pkg_glob, FreeBSD 6.2-p8 20071005 (c) The FreeBSD Project, Akinori Musha
Xorg-7.3 input modules issues: The X11 mailing list (http://docs.freebsd.org/mail/archive/2007/freebsd-x11/20070909.freebsd-x11.html), week ending 9th September 2007 to present, (c) various authors, list run by The FreeBSD Project.

[Dag]

the Xorg 7.3 ABI is incompatible.
The painless solution is to just stick with Xorg 7.2 for the time being.
However, there are a few things I fail to understand.
Xorg is Open Source, there have been a few RCs, every Dev knew what was coming.
Is the wretched thing THAT incompatible, everything has to be made from scratch ?
If so, why was the Linux driver availible as soon as 7.3 was out ?
(Not to mention that Linux adopted 7.3 earlier than FreeBSD)
Is it so much more difficult to write a BSD driver, even if you already have one for Linux ?
Are we facing politics here ?
Is there is a whole team for Linux, while Zander is on his own ?

[Chronos_]

I have no idea, Dag. I don't think we're looking at a political issue, more a technical one. If you look at the e-mail Zander sent last year (http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2006-June/016995.html), you'll see that FreeBSD falls short of a few things that nVidia need to bring the driver to feature parity with the other platforms and it's just possible that Xorg 7.3 has exacerbated the issues surrounding these missing features (conjecture; I really have no idea but, with the same information as anyone else, I'd prefer to err on the side of caution than alienate the only company that provides a graphics driver for us).

There's also a Wiki page somewhere with a progress report. As you no doubt know, the kernel module is the biggest challenge on FreeBSD and there seems to be little progress on the issues that Zander raised. One or two things have been implemented in -CURRENT, but not enough to allow an amd64 port (another issue that seems to crop up on these forums, even though it has been explained time and again) or Zander to include the improvements in speed and reliability to the driver. I very much doubt the BSD driver has a full-time developer. It's more likely that it's something of a pet project for one or two people who also work on the other platforms. If you pop over to the Linux area of this forum, you'll probably notice that Zander is also very much involved with the Linux driver. He's also in evidence on the Solaris section. Again, I don't know nVidia's internal structure but, going on the available information, this seems more likely than not.

It is my belief that if BSD's driver were simply a case of taking the Linux code and tweaking it a bit, it would be posted. Given that it hasn't been, my opinion is it is better to wait for working code and assume that it is most definitely not that easy than pressure release of something that isn't ready.