Christopher Stone wrote:

> I don't give a hoot if the packages are supported or not, I just want
> an easy way to get my nVidia card working.

I'm curious, are you being even half as vocal about this to NVidia?

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2008/5/21 Christopher Stone <chris.stone@gmail.com>:

> I *have* looked at the smolt stats, and they don't make any sense at
> all. 1.6% and 1.9%, that doesn't make any sense, the smolt stats have
> to be wrong. I'm sure the total number of nVidia and ATI fedora
> desktop users is more than 4%.

That is less surprising than you might think.

All but a handful of the >100 machines in this building shipped with
SiS onboard video. A number of us have *added* ATI graphics (in the
form of an outdated but well supported PCI Radeon 9250).

These cards have been quite well supported (with 3D) for a long, long
time. For none of that time has *any* nVidia hardware had a stable,
supported "open source" 3D driver. The ATI card has, and it was
enabled by ATI providing specs to developers, albeit I am given to
understand (correct me if I'm wrong) under an NDA that could not be
transferred to others once some of the original developers moved on to
other projects.

So, to sum up the actual *evidence* in this thread so far:

The new X.org server has a new ABI. It isn't going to change when the
"magical fairy dust" of the "1.5" version number is applied.

Due to his modesty, ajax has not loudly trumpeted the fact he's the
one who gets to decide when it's done this time around; if he says
version 1.4.1.5.9.26.535.89.79.323846 is ready to ship, it's ready to
ship.

The (open source) ATI drivers are working, with the new server,
because they're a part of the distribution, and one or two people
posting on this thread have been involved in updating those drivers to
work with the new ABI (and significant new development, too). This was
possible because they are, well, open source.

The (closed source) nVidia drivers are not.

I don't know the status of the closed source ATI drivers, and I don't
care too much, because I don't need to use them. However AMD,
including one of the developers who works on the open source drivers,
is working hard to make open source drivers work for newer cards, and
it would appear a lot of progress has been made.

This is not to mention Intel (I don't have any Intel graphics here,
and I don't think I've ever used any; I've had Cirrus Logic, Savage,
Matrox, and several ATI cards including Mach64 of various vintages as
well as my current Radeons). The last nVidia hardware I used was a
TNT2 in a Dell machine a few jobs back, and that was running NT.

Please, stop wingeing and look at the "facts on the ground" as my
manager would say )

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2008/5/21 Christopher Stone <chris.stone@gmail.com>:
> 2008/5/20 David Boles <dgboles@gmail.com>:
>> I need this too. So get busy and provide this please. ;-)
>
> Sure, as soon as I get Ajax's paycheck I'll do his job for him....

I'm sure you'd really enjoy doing backports for RHEL updates ... ;o)
ask him about his job sometime )

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>
> Note also, this situation would have been even less painful if
> xorg-drv-{nv,nouveau} actually worked sensibly even in 2D. #182517 is
> getting pretty old and #234824 is just painful.
>


The first is a chipset issue that nvidia have never fixed. It only seems
to happen on the 6150s and no fix has ever been sighted.

The second bug should be fixed in the rawhide nouveau package, which
I'll push into F9 at some point soon, randr should be enabled by default
now so we actually use the hardware instead of just doing what the BIOS
told us to do. I meant to enable randr12 by default for F9, but I messed
up :-(. I'll fix this soon.

Dave.

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2008/5/21 Christopher Stone <chris.stone@gmail.com>:

> But isn't packaging part of his responsibilities? It just seems to me
> that an upgrade path for nVidia users could be provided without much
> extra effort.

You're asking for a *downgrade* of Xorg to support them )

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2008/5/21 Christopher Stone <chris.stone@gmail.com>:

> I think you are missing the point. Just because nVidia sucks, it
> doesn't mean we have to make Fedora "suck". This is linux, and it
> should be possible to have a system which everyone can enjoy. With
> just a little bit of extra effort, a set of stable xorg rpms could
> have been provided in a f9 testing repo for nVidia users to use
> temporarily. We can still make a distro which is friendly to nVidia
> users without slowing down progress for everyone else. I see this
> mainly as a user friendliness issue more than an open source vs closed
> source issue. I hope Josh is correct and we will have some nVidia
> drivers to test with soon.

How is providing a new, shiny Xorg making Fedora "suck", please?

There is a set of stable xorg rpms; it's in /pub/fedora/linux/updates/8/ ...

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On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 1:23 AM, Andrew Farris <lordmorgul@gmail.com> wrote:

> Had Fedora not released with the new Xorg
> ABI nvidia would probably still not be actively working on it yet.

Actually development looks like it started before Fedora 9 released:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=111460

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Le Mar 20 mai 2008 23:51, Christopher Stone a écrit :
> 2008/5/20 Jesse Keating <jkeating@redhat.com>:
>> On Tue, 2008-05-20 at 14:40 -0700, Christopher Stone wrote:
>> Two xservers is just insanity. Those on nvidia can choose between
>> using
>> the nv driver in F9, or continuing to use F8 until Nvidia gets their
>> act
>> together. The price you pay...
>
> Until nVidia gets their act together?? What the H.E. double hockey
> sticks are you talking about? nVidia can't do anything until xorg's
> ABI is *stable*. They cannot keep chasing a moving target

When nvidia decided to go the proprietary closed driver route, they
*chose* to keep chasing a moving target. If they don't chase is
properly complain to nvidia. Either they work within xorg as FLOSS and
get updated with the rest of xorg, or they work outside xorg and have
to follow xorg changes by themselves.

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On Tue, 2008-05-20 at 15:54 -0700, Christopher Stone wrote:
> According to this thread it seems pretty simple actually:
>
> http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=188645
>
> If redhat wants to pay me $100k a year, I'll happily make xorg compat
> rpms in about one day. Thank you very much.

<OT>
Personal suggestion:
Given the fact that you posts are archived, and can be found by, say,
your next employer, I'd think twice before making an ass of myself in
public.
</OT>

- Gilboa




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Emmanuel Seyman wrote:

* Callum Lerwick [21/05/2008 11:03] :

I like how in these threads it keeps conveniently being ignored that we work
just fine out of the box on Nvidia. We just don't have 3D yet.


I've always being surprised at the amount of blame-shifting that occurs
in regards to Nvidia's drivers.

- The free drivers suck. This apparently isn't NVidia's fault (which is
strange since they help maintain it) but the x.org developers'.


Yet everyone here keeps saying something better would happen if only the
proprietary driver were free.



- The non-free drivers aren't free. This apparently isn't NVidia's fault.


There are such things as non disclosure agreements that can prevent
publishing information. Why shouldn't you respect their legal obligations?



- This makes the drivers impossible to ship as part of the distribution
or support as a third-party repo. This is somehow the distribution's
fault.


The binaries permit redistribution. How does that make it impossible to
have in a repository?



- They don't release drivers once the ABI is frozen or even the day
stable releases of x.org are issued. This apparently isn't their fault.


This seems to be speculation, seeing as how we don't have a release and
the xorg drivers were done before they told anyone else the interface
was stable.



- They won't release the specs. This apparently isn't their fault.


It may be legal commitments - but its their right either way and not
really anyone else's business.



- They badmouth the open source developement model. I have no idea why
but this isn't their fault.


Open source is probably a tiny part of their business. The stuff seems
OK on a Mac and I haven't seen this kind of complaint about Solaris
which uses essentially the same driver. But perhaps they do a better
job of coordinating their releases so all the needed components are
ready before users have to deal with it.


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