Official FreeBSD drivers

[erek]

Will NVIDIA ever release new FreeBSD drivers? or have they dropped support? The future seems bleak... no one ever responds, sent several e-mails to the provided e-mail in documentation, not one reply, many people say they have never replied.
Very disappointing to say the least, it also appears that Linux support has gone way down hill, everyone is constantly having problems with the new drivers...

[MrPolitics]

Originally posted by erek
Will NVIDIA ever release new FreeBSD drivers? or have they dropped support? The future seems bleak... no one ever responds, sent several e-mails to the provided e-mail in documentation, not one reply, many people say they have never replied.
Very disappointing to say the least, it also appears that Linux support has gone way down hill, everyone is constantly having problems with the new drivers...

I have been wondering the same thing ... the current NVIDIA drivers do not even work "out of the box" on FreeBSD -CURRENT since they switched from the old libc_r threading library to the new libkse. I _hope_ that NVIDIA continues to support both Linux and FreeBSD, and I hope to see new and improved drivers soon.

P.S. NVIDIA, where are you?

[peace]

hey!

i have a little problem and hope someone here has the right hint for me.
i run a freebsd machine (4.9-RELEASE-p1) with an athlon xp 1800+ (abit kt7a with via kt133a, 256mb pc-133 sdram) and an old gforce 2 mx 400. i use the driver 1.0.4365 with the freebsd agp driver under xfree 4.3.0 and have some really strange problems.
first, x runs smooth. so i tried glxgears, than cube - no problems. also RTCW - Enemy Territory, which is a linux app, runs really smooth (sometimes the keyboard and mouse don't react anymore and only a remote kill can help, but i think it's not the nvidia driver)...

BUT later i noticed some strange behaviour of my reallyslick screensaver. i had several core dumps in my home...
so i played a bit with helios (from reallyslick). if i start/stop this several times (in short times behind each other), i get sometimes a segmentation fault, sometimes the machine hangs and resets after a while...
so i asked gdb:

...
Core was generated by `helios'.
Program terminated with signal 10, Bus error.
...
(gdb) where
#0 0x2815d784 in __nvsym17440 () from /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.so.1
#1 0x2813a9d3 in __nvsym17564 () from /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.so.1
Cannot access memory at address 0x2.

any ideas???
this is only one little problem...
the second one is a bit uglier!!!
if i run x over a longer time (over a day or so) and i want to exit my window manager, i see the text from the console in a really dark grey color and after 5 seconds the machine will also do a reset - which is really ugly...

i tried also the nvidia agp driver, but this freeze my machine if i start x...
nothing is overclocked or tweaked !!!
in the past i had a pentium3 (850mhz, asus cube-x) with a tnt2 and never a problem...

i hope you understand my poor english

thanx anyway
P.E.A.C.E.

[Harvey Pooka]

Originally posted by peace
hey!

i have a little problem and hope someone here has the right hint for me.
i run a freebsd machine (4.9-RELEASE-p1) with an athlon xp 1800+ (abit kt7a with via kt133a, 256mb pc-133 sdram) and an old gforce 2 mx 400. i use the driver 1.0.4365 with the freebsd agp driver under xfree 4.3.0 and have some really strange problems.
first, x runs smooth. so i tried glxgears, than cube - no problems. also RTCW - Enemy Territory, which is a linux app, runs really smooth (sometimes the keyboard and mouse don't react anymore and only a remote kill can help, but i think it's not the nvidia driver)...

BUT later i noticed some strange behaviour of my reallyslick screensaver. i had several core dumps in my home...
so i played a bit with helios (from reallyslick). if i start/stop this several times (in short times behind each other), i get sometimes a segmentation fault, sometimes the machine hangs and resets after a while...
so i asked gdb:

...
Core was generated by `helios'.
Program terminated with signal 10, Bus error.
...
(gdb) where
#0 0x2815d784 in __nvsym17440 () from /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.so.1
#1 0x2813a9d3 in __nvsym17564 () from /usr/X11R6/lib/libGL.so.1
Cannot access memory at address 0x2.

any ideas???
this is only one little problem...
the second one is a bit uglier!!!
if i run x over a longer time (over a day or so) and i want to exit my window manager, i see the text from the console in a really dark grey color and after 5 seconds the machine will also do a reset - which is really ugly...

i tried also the nvidia agp driver, but this freeze my machine if i start x...
nothing is overclocked or tweaked !!!
in the past i had a pentium3 (850mhz, asus cube-x) with a tnt2 and never a problem...

i hope you understand my poor english

thanx anyway
P.E.A.C.E.

Your problem is just like mine. I have:

Athlon XP 2100+
Soltek 75DRV5
512MB Crucial ECC
Gainward Ti4200

Symptoms:
1. I lose the mouse. Jumping to the console and back gets it back.
2. Miscellaneous core dumps of executables as the system loses stability.
3. Running America's Army a few times usually brings the instability faster.
4. System panics.

I have tried all the permutations I could think of to solve the problem. For example, I have experimented with:
1. New video card
2. Both AGP drivers
3. With and without optimization flags for XFree86 and nVidia drivers.
4. memtest86
5. Reseated all of my cards, memory and CPU.

The fact that you have nearly the same symptoms show me that it is related to the driver.

I sent nVidia a stack traces of my panics that I had collected at the time. They said they would look into it. I hope sooner than later.

[erek]

Originally posted by Harvey Pooka
Your problem is just like mine. I have:

Athlon XP 2100+
Soltek 75DRV5
512MB Crucial ECC
Gainward Ti4200

Symptoms:
1. I lose the mouse. Jumping to the console and back gets it back.
2. Miscellaneous core dumps of executables as the system loses stability.
3. Running America's Army a few times usually brings the instability faster.
4. System panics.

I have tried all the permutations I could think of to solve the problem. For example, I have experimented with:
1. New video card
2. Both AGP drivers
3. With and without optimization flags for XFree86 and nVidia drivers.
4. memtest86
5. Reseated all of my cards, memory and CPU.

The fact that you have nearly the same symptoms show me that it is related to the driver.

I sent nVidia a stack traces of my panics that I had collected at the time. They said they would look into it. I hope sooner than later.

Good to hear you actually got a response out of them

[sa-]

oh hell, FX 5200 are not supported yet?!
2 days ago i bought the card, couldnt get it to work, and now i see its not even
supported.
there is a card but there is no driver for card, perfect.

[Jandrese]

FreeBSD 5-CURRENT recently went though the switch from libc_r to libpthread, unfortunatly the current Nvidia drivers only support libc_r, forcing anybody using them to keep all of their binaries compiled under the obsolete libc_r flags. Are you planning to release an updated driver with support for libpthread anytime soon? If it makes my Geforce FX5900 work, that would be even better.

[blueworm]

Freebsd 5.1
FX5900 works with 4365 driver...

[erek]

Originally posted by blueworm
Freebsd 5.1
FX5900 works with 4365 driver...

I got an FX 5900 also in 5.2-RELEASE-p2, could you help me try and figure out something?

http://tenebrae2.com (it's a Quake1 modification using Stencil Shadows and pixel shaders) I submitted patches to make it compile and run on FreeBSD, but the application sometimes locks up for me..

[blueworm]

The make setup script that you use to install the driver adds nvidia_load="YES" to
/boot/loader.conf.
But for some reason it fails to load.
I removed this and tried loading it by hand and it works OK.
I then added kldload nvidia to a init script. and that seems to work fine.
All this said it is rather unstable. It has crashed on me several times and allways in X.
Not neccesarily playing games.
This is pretty much all I actually know.

[shupienis]

Originally posted by Steve
Thanks

A quick question, I notices it uses Linux compatibility. How much of the driver is linux based and how much is this likely to affect performance?

Really, it's almost none. Linux compatibility in FreeBSD is NOT an emulator, it merely means that various symbolic links are made to direct the software to the "Proper" BSD locations. Unlike Linux, *BSD usually adheres strictly to a predefined, standard directory structure, whereas Linux leaves it up to the whim of the distribution creator. (That's why a SUSE RPM won't work with Mandrake, etc.) For more information, go to the nearest *BSD box and type "man hier".

The only extra things that "Linux compatibility" makes the system do is mount a Linux-style procfs system, and launch a kernel module -- both of which support things Linux programs expect in order to work.

After that, it's wide-open speed, just as fast as on Linux.

Have fun using your world-class OS!
//Joe

[disenter]

Hi all,

New to this forum.. wondering if anyone can help?
Running the -RELEASE version, but why is it not supported? or rather, why are only -STABLE or -CURRENT versions supported? Whats different in a -RELEASE version that prevents it from working?

Can the drivers be modified so that they will work?

It compiles, installs and kldloads ok, but when i edit the XF86Config file, to suit the new drivers, and try to startx it crashes...
Says the chipset is not for this driver as a warning, then gets an error saying that no device was found...

change the driver in the XF86Config back to "nv" and it works fine.. but thats not the driver I want!..

HELP! anybody

Cheers