On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 3:40 PM, Christopher Stone
<chris.stone@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 2:30 PM, Daniel P. Berrange <berrange@redhat.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 05:23:47PM -0400, Jason Tang wrote:
>>> The only problem being that this release is incompatible with current
>>> nvidia drivers. Granted, I'm aware of the Fedora position regarding
>>> non-OSS, but this Xorg issue has completely destroyed many user's
>>> confidence in the dev team.
>>>
>>> Most users could care less about supposed 'valid' reasons - that fact
>>> is: No 3D acceleration == No F9 adoption (or worse, an eroding user
>>> base). Lets not play this game with F10.
>>
>> Well I'm an Intel & Radeon user and Xorg in F9 is dramatically better
>> better for all my machines. So, yes, if new code improves life for the
>> open source drivers, lets do this again & again in future releaes. I don't
>> want my desktop experiance held hostage by one company with binary drivers.
>> I chose hardware which is supportable so I can get the best & latest open
>> source has to offer.
>
> Why the H.E. double hockey sticks do people think proving
> compatibility packages for nVidia users will somehow hold the desktop
> hostage for everyone else?
>
> I do not understand why ajax could not provide compatibility rpms for
> nVidia users? Is he not paid by redhat? I mean just how difficult
> can it be to provide F8 xorg rpms on F9 for nVidia users??
>

He is paid by Red Hat to work on X, not to be your personal slave. You
want that find out what it costs first.. I am guessing around
100k/year for that kind of nightmare. Otherwise stay with F8 until
your card is supported. Especially since he would need to make sure
that pretty much every X app is compiled twice with one with the old
API and one with the new one.

--
Stephen J Smoogen. -- BSD/GNU/Linux
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"

--
fedora-devel-list mailing list
fedora-devel-list@redhat.com
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 2:53 PM, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 3:40 PM, Christopher Stone
> <chris.stone@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 2:30 PM, Daniel P. Berrange <berrange@redhat.com> wrote:
>>> On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 05:23:47PM -0400, Jason Tang wrote:
>>>> The only problem being that this release is incompatible with current
>>>> nvidia drivers. Granted, I'm aware of the Fedora position regarding
>>>> non-OSS, but this Xorg issue has completely destroyed many user's
>>>> confidence in the dev team.
>>>>
>>>> Most users could care less about supposed 'valid' reasons - that fact
>>>> is: No 3D acceleration == No F9 adoption (or worse, an eroding user
>>>> base). Lets not play this game with F10.
>>>
>>> Well I'm an Intel & Radeon user and Xorg in F9 is dramatically better
>>> better for all my machines. So, yes, if new code improves life for the
>>> open source drivers, lets do this again & again in future releaes. I don't
>>> want my desktop experiance held hostage by one company with binary drivers.
>>> I chose hardware which is supportable so I can get the best & latest open
>>> source has to offer.
>>
>> Why the H.E. double hockey sticks do people think proving
>> compatibility packages for nVidia users will somehow hold the desktop
>> hostage for everyone else?
>>
>> I do not understand why ajax could not provide compatibility rpms for
>> nVidia users? Is he not paid by redhat? I mean just how difficult
>> can it be to provide F8 xorg rpms on F9 for nVidia users??
>>
>
> He is paid by Red Hat to work on X, not to be your personal slave. You
> want that find out what it costs first.. I am guessing around
> 100k/year for that kind of nightmare. Otherwise stay with F8 until
> your card is supported. Especially since he would need to make sure
> that pretty much every X app is compiled twice with one with the old
> API and one with the new one.


What? The way I understand it is that you could simply use the xorg on
F8 with F9 without needing to recompile anything (except maybe other
xorg packages)? I thought someone had already taken this approach
from what I've read in the fedora forums.

Obviously if you have to recompile every app that runs on X this would
not be feasible, but I understand that this is not actually the case?
Please enlighten me.

--
fedora-devel-list mailing list
fedora-devel-list@redhat.com
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list

Christopher Stone wrote:
> Why the H.E. double hockey sticks do people think proving
> compatibility packages for nVidia users will somehow hold the
> desktop hostage for everyone else?
>
> I do not understand why ajax could not provide compatibility rpms
> for nVidia users? Is he not paid by redhat? I mean just how
> difficult can it be to provide F8 xorg rpms on F9 for nVidia users??

I wouldn't be surprised if ajax came after you with a few hockey
sticks for suggesting that he do all that extra work just to support
some binary drivers.

Use F-8 for a while longer if you really must have nvidia drivers.

--
Todd OpenPGP -> KeyID: 0xBEAF0CE3 | URL: www.pobox.com/~tmz/pgp
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level
wouldn't cure.
-- Ross MacDonald (1915-1983)

--
fedora-devel-list mailing list
fedora-devel-list@redhat.com
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 1:51 PM, Christopher Stone
<chris.stone@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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. If xorg
> declared today that the ABI will be stable then perhaps nVidia can get
> working on new drivers. Perhaps xorg has already done this??

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=107725
05-13-08, 12:48 AM
"I got assurance from the release manager that the ABI won't be
changing between now and the official xserver 1.5 release, so the ABI
will be marked as supported in the next driver release so that
-ignoreABI won't be required."

>
> And I don't see why you can't have two different xorg packages. We
> have other compat packages with gcc and libstdc++, etc...

I think you are over-simplifying the complexity of what it would take
to make such a scheme work for the "framework" that is X. If you can
do it, and make it work seemlessly, more power to you. But I have no
doubt that it is wrong to make this sort of demand on ajax's time.
We've seen compatibility issues in the past with regard to nvidia on
release day. There is absolutely nothing new here.

-jef

--
fedora-devel-list mailing list
fedora-devel-list@redhat.com
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list

Christopher Stone wrote:

And I don't see why you can't have two different xorg packages. We
have other compat packages with gcc and libstdc++, etc...

Those are very different beasts. If you have two different libstdc++
packages other packages will depend on one or the other of them. If you
have two different X Servers packages need to run on both of them. Even
if there aren't compile time changes that require packages to be ported
to support both versions (or be compiled twice to each set of libraries)
you still have the QA and support burden of making sure each of those
packages run on either one of the X Servers.


-Toshio

--
fedora-devel-list mailing list
fedora-devel-list@redhat.com
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 3:05 PM, Jeff Spaleta <jspaleta@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 1:51 PM, Christopher Stone
> <chris.stone@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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. If xorg
>> declared today that the ABI will be stable then perhaps nVidia can get
>> working on new drivers. Perhaps xorg has already done this??
>
> http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=107725
> 05-13-08, 12:48 AM
> "I got assurance from the release manager that the ABI won't be
> changing between now and the official xserver 1.5 release, so the ABI
> will be marked as supported in the next driver release so that
> -ignoreABI won't be required."

Okay, this is good news. I'll post on the nVidia forums to make sure
they know. I still think it's a bit uncalled for to say nVidia should
get their act together when the ABI was only declared stable last
week.

>
>>
>> And I don't see why you can't have two different xorg packages. We
>> have other compat packages with gcc and libstdc++, etc...
>
> I think you are over-simplifying the complexity of what it would take
> to make such a scheme work for the "framework" that is X. If you can
> do it, and make it work seemlessly, more power to you. But I have no
> doubt that it is wrong to make this sort of demand on ajax's time.
> We've seen compatibility issues in the past with regard to nvidia on
> release day. There is absolutely nothing new here.

As I stated in my original post "just how hard can it be to provide
compatibility packages?" From what I understand, you could just drop
in the F8 packages right into F9 and that's all that is required.
Then nVidia users could use the f8 version of xorg while everyone else
could use the f9 version. Why is it not that simple?

--
fedora-devel-list mailing list
fedora-devel-list@redhat.com
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 4:40 PM, Christopher Stone <chris.stone@gmail.com> wrote:

Why the H.E. double hockey sticks do people think proving

compatibility packages for nVidia users will somehow hold the desktop

hostage for everyone else?
LURK MOAR


--
fedora-devel-list mailing list
fedora-devel-list@redhat.com
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list

Jeff Spaleta wrote:

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 1:23 PM, Jason Tang <jtang@magma.ca> wrote:


The only problem being that this release is incompatible with current
nvidia drivers. Granted, I'm aware of the Fedora position regarding
non-OSS, but this Xorg issue has completely destroyed many user's
confidence in the dev team.



This would have happened even if Xorg's release was on time and we
were shipping a blessed xorg server 1.5. The internal changes in
the xserver which break nvidia's drivers would still be there... and
Nvidia would still wait for a distribution to ship with those changes
before releasing a driver. Those of us who have run versions of Fedora
from FC1 onward have seen this happen before. And it will happen
again. The only reason why we didnt see it recently is because X has
been somewhat stagnant. The fact that we are releasing 1.4.99 instead
of 1.5 isn't the reason why this is happening. Nvidia will always
lag when an Xorg codebase change requires drivers to be updated. The
changes that were incompatible with nvidia have been in the Xorg that
Fedora 9 is shipping for months now. I'm sure Nvidia is aware of them.



Most users could care less about supposed 'valid' reasons - that fact
is: No 3D acceleration == No F9 adoption (or worse, an eroding user
base). Lets not play this game with F10.



While this is certainly not ideal.. close source drivers will never be
ideal...you need to take a long view with regard to Nvidia. Xorg is
free to make changes, Fedora will adopt those changes. When the
Xserver has internal changes which break drivers...nvidia's drivers
availability will lag. This has absolutely nothing to do with the fact
that xserver 1.5 isn't officially released. Nvidia could have chosen
to release beta drivers to users over a month ago built against
xserver 1.4.99...which would have continued to work with xserver 1.5
on release.

Those of us who have followed Fedora from FC1 or earlier from the RHL
era, know how this works. When Fedora includes a version of X makes an
internal change which is incompatible, nvidia lags with the release of
new drivers by at least two weeks. There is a track record here.

-jef


If F9 was shipping a stable Xserver 1.5, the Nvidia devs would likely
have had time to update their drivers, or at least have a head start on
the process. Regardless, IMHO there's more than enough blame to go
around: Fedora, Xorg, Nvidia.


I just don't think neglecting 2/3 of the user base makes sense. The
fact is, many people use nvidia hardware. It would have seemed that
pushing Xorg 1.4.99 to the development repo would have made more sense
from a stability perspective. After all, it is a 'pre-release'.


- J

--
fedora-devel-list mailing list
fedora-devel-list@redhat.com
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 4:10 PM, Christopher Stone
<chris.stone@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> As I stated in my original post "just how hard can it be to provide
> compatibility packages?" From what I understand, you could just drop
> in the F8 packages right into F9 and that's all that is required.
> Then nVidia users could use the f8 version of xorg while everyone else
> could use the f9 version. Why is it not that simple?

Because there are ABI changes between the old and the new?


--
Stephen J Smoogen. -- BSD/GNU/Linux
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"

--
fedora-devel-list mailing list
fedora-devel-list@redhat.com
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 2:10 PM, Christopher Stone
<chris.stone@gmail.com> wrote:
> Okay, this is good news. I'll post on the nVidia forums to make sure
> they know. I still think it's a bit uncalled for to say nVidia should
> get their act together when the ABI was only declared stable last
> week.

Dude that thread is super long...and I was quoting an nvidia dev from
the thread.
Trust me... they know. Post #42 is a really good read concerning the
recent history of the ABI. There is absolutely nothing new here.

> As I stated in my original post "just how hard can it be to provide
> compatibility packages?" From what I understand, you could just drop
> in the F8 packages right into F9 and that's all that is required.
> Then nVidia users could use the f8 version of xorg while everyone else
> could use the f9 version. Why is it not that simple?

You replace the f9 versions with the f8 versions. Making that work
seemlessly is the trick.
And if you read the nvnews thread I just dug up...people have been
able to recompile the driver that is available and get it to work.
This is a storm in a teacup. It will blow itself out soon enough.

-jef

--
fedora-devel-list mailing list
fedora-devel-list@redhat.com
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list