undefined | Better HN

0 pointstony5y ago0 comments

Surprisingly - they have a working driver for FreeBSD. Never had an issue with it - and the performance is fantastic. As far back as early 2000's I remember installing proprietary nvidia drivers on Linux and playing UT2004.

Maybe Nintendo/Sony uses Nvidia cards on their developer machines? I imagine FreeBSD drivers aren't simply altruism on their part.

On the other hand, stagnation on other fronts:

- Nouveau (tried recently) is basically unusable on Ubuntu. As in the mouse/keyboard locks every 6 seconds.

- Proprietary drivers won't work with wayland

And since their stuff isn't open, the community can't do much to push Nouveau forward.

0 comments

phire5y ago

Nvidia's "Blob" approach does have an advantage when it comes to supporting random OSes.

It's less of a driver and more of an operating system. Basically self-contained with all the support libraries it needs. Super easy to port to a new operating system and any driver improvement work on all OSes.

But the approach also has many downsides. It's big. It ignores all the native stuff (like linux's GEM interface).

It also has random issues with locking up the entire system. Like if you are debugging a process with the linux drivers, a breakpoint or a pause in the wrong place can deadlock the system.

loeg5y ago

You say that, but: Nvidia's "blob" driver doesn't have CUDA, NVENC/NVDEC, nor DDC I2C support on FreeBSD — despite all of this functionality being specific to Nvidia's own hardware, and the support being present in the Linux blob, which runs on a relatively similar platform.

If the only differing bits were the portability framework, this would just be a matter of adding missing support. But it isn't — the FreeBSD object file Nvidia publishes lacks the internal symbols used by the Linux driver.

magic_quotes5y ago

> If the only differing bits were the portability framework, this would just be a matter of adding missing support. But it isn't — the FreeBSD object file Nvidia publishes lacks the internal symbols used by the Linux driver.

In fact it is. For Linux and FreeBSD Nvidia distributes exactly the same blob for compilation into nvidia.ko; the blobs for nvidia-modeset.ko are slightly different. (Don't take my word for it, download both drivers and compare kernel/nvidia/nv-kernel.o_binary with src/nvidia/nv-kernel.o.) Nothing is locked in the closed source part.

1 more reply

magic_quotes5y ago

Native Linux stuff is not at all native for FreeBSD. If Nvidia suddenly decides to open their driver (to merge it into Linux), FreeBSD and Solaris support will be the first thing thrown out.

zamadatix5y ago

Not just developer machines e.g. the Nintendo Switch uses an Nvidia Tegra X1 and run FreeBSD. Lots of game consoles do, you don't have to worry about the GPL.

Shared4045y ago

I thought the switch ran a modified form of android, but just looked it up and found this on the Switch Wikipedia page:

> Despite popular misconceptions to the contrary, Horizon [The switch software's codename] is not largely derived from FreeBSD code, nor from Android, although the software licence[7] and reverse engineering efforts[8][9] have revealed that Nintendo does use some code from both in some system services and drivers.

That being said, at least one of the Playstation's runs a modified form of FreeBSD.

Edit: add [The ... codename]

loeg5y ago

The FreeBSD blob driver will drive a monitor, but it lacks a bunch of GPU hardware support the Linux one has: all of CUDA, NVENC/NVDEC, I²C DDC, and certainly more.

non-entity5y ago

I knew it was too good to be true.

gautamcgoel5y ago

Is the FreeBDD driver open source? Also, somehow I was under the impression they stopped maintaining the FreeBSD driver. Is that correct?

magic_quotes5y ago

> impression they stopped maintaining the FreeBSD driver.

It's maintained while simultaneously not receiving any new features.

throwaway20485y ago

Note this includes support for newer cards, so its only a matter of time before FreeBSD support is EOL'd

2 more replies

Conan_Kudo5y ago

They did. The proprietary NVIDIA driver is required on FreeBSD as well. The FreeBSD community just doesn't care about this.

dheera5y ago

The proprietary driver also doesn't support fractional scaling on 20.04 and I've been waiting ages for that.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

phire5y ago

Nvidia's "Blob" approach does have an advantage when it comes to supporting random OSes.

But the approach also has many downsides. It's big. It ignores all the native stuff (like linux's GEM interface).

It also has random issues with locking up the entire system. Like if you are debugging a process with the linux drivers, a breakpoint or a pause in the wrong place can deadlock the system.

loeg5y ago

magic_quotes5y ago

1 more reply

magic_quotes5y ago

Native Linux stuff is not at all native for FreeBSD. If Nvidia suddenly decides to open their driver (to merge it into Linux), FreeBSD and Solaris support will be the first thing thrown out.

zamadatix5y ago

Not just developer machines e.g. the Nintendo Switch uses an Nvidia Tegra X1 and run FreeBSD. Lots of game consoles do, you don't have to worry about the GPL.

Shared4045y ago

I thought the switch ran a modified form of android, but just looked it up and found this on the Switch Wikipedia page:

That being said, at least one of the Playstation's runs a modified form of FreeBSD.

Edit: add [The ... codename]

loeg5y ago

The FreeBSD blob driver will drive a monitor, but it lacks a bunch of GPU hardware support the Linux one has: all of CUDA, NVENC/NVDEC, I²C DDC, and certainly more.

non-entity5y ago

I knew it was too good to be true.

gautamcgoel5y ago

Is the FreeBDD driver open source? Also, somehow I was under the impression they stopped maintaining the FreeBSD driver. Is that correct?

magic_quotes5y ago

> impression they stopped maintaining the FreeBSD driver.

It's maintained while simultaneously not receiving any new features.

throwaway20485y ago

Note this includes support for newer cards, so its only a matter of time before FreeBSD support is EOL'd

2 more replies

Conan_Kudo5y ago

They did. The proprietary NVIDIA driver is required on FreeBSD as well. The FreeBSD community just doesn't care about this.

dheera5y ago

The proprietary driver also doesn't support fractional scaling on 20.04 and I've been waiting ages for that.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse