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Date:      Sat, 07 Apr 2001 11:22:58 -0700
From:      Matthew Reimer <mreimer@vpop.net>
To:        Coleman Kane <cokane@FreeBSD.ORG>
Cc:        Marc van Woerkom <van.woerkom@netcologne.de>, Alexander@leidinger.net, 3d@FreeBSD.ORG, multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: nvidia binary drivers
Message-ID:  <3ACF5B02.FE96E2F4@vpop.net>
References:  <200104031906.f33J6mE00856@Magelan.Leidinger.net> <200104032108.f33L8N633809@oranje.my.domain> <20010407001754.C40343@cokane.yi.org>

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Coleman Kane wrote:
> 
> I'll clear this up. All the DRI drivers require one to load a
> hardware-dependent driver into the kernel. Many vendors already have their
> support in the XFree86 4.x tree. They are as follows (with module listed):
> Matrox: mga
> 3DFx: tdfx
> 3DLabs: glint
> ATI: r128
> 
> NVidia decided they would have SGI help them make a module that totally
> beat the other cards in performance under GNU/Linux. Unfortunately for
> us, SGI refused to let NVidia release the source, and only released a
> binary kernel object for linux. This module is in no way useable by the
> FreeBSD kernel. There are some docs up on how to get the open source
> drivers listed above to work (except the r128 driver) on FreeBSD with
> DRI. The DRI module loads the hardware-specific module, the agp module,
> and the drm module into the kernel. There are seperate modules strictly
> for BSD in the xfree86 4 source tree. I do not believe that they are
> compiled by default, so you must do them seprately, or edit the cf file
> to compile them.

Here's the bottom line for Nvidia users from an Nvidia employee:

> We'll be happy to work with people to get our code up and running, but it's
> important to note that our drivers do not use DRI, we use our own direct
> rendering mechanism.  There are exactly 3 source files which need to be
> ported from linux to freebsd, then after that, it should be fairly simple to
> get all of our drivers running on FreeBSD.  Again, we do intend to do this,
> we've just been swamped and haven't yet had bandwidth to do this work.

The above quote is from
http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=171177+175462+/usr/local/www/db/text/2000/freebsd-hackers/20000910.freebsd-hackers

Matt

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