Driver 96-43.05

[David Marec]

Hello,

My FreeBSD box is now updated to FreeBSD 7.0.

I read on this board that a new release of the 96-x driver is available, but not from the port tree.

I began to read the instructions here : http://www.nvidia.com/object/freebsd..._96.43.05.html

But the «README» link is not correct.

I would like to know if the «compat-5x» is still required to run the driver ?

[gigiita]

Yes, it is required
It seems that nVidia driver are still based on old 5.x structure....

[David Marec]

Originally Posted by gigiita

Yes, it is required
It seems that nVidia driver are still based on old 5.x structure....

Actually, this new driver is not available for FreeBSD 7 branch.

[gigiita]

Originally Posted by David Marec

Actually, this new driver is not available for FreeBSD 7 branch.

Yes, but from long time ago it is possible to use any driver version under FreeBSD 7 branch (and even on 8). Simply, in case they works (and it is not always true), they use the same infrastructure as under 6 branch: compat5x is anyway required.
The new 7 branch is not so different from the older to require a completely new driver release, just some minor patch will do the work. And since it seems that nVidia is so sticky with that compatibility package, there are no reason to believe they will do a total rework of their driver

[zander]

The compat-5x-i386 package is required because the NVIDIA FreeBSD graphics driver's user-space components are built on a FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE system and pick up references to that FreeBSD release's system libraries. The driver components will likely continue to be built on FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE until FreeBSD drops backwards compatibility. That said, official FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE support is planned for the near future.