Date: Mon, 28 Mar 2022 05:54:49 +0100 From: Steve O'Hara-Smith <steve@sohara.org> To: Valeri Galtsev <galtsev@kicp.uchicago.edu> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Using a FreeBSD desktop was somehting about dog food Message-ID: <20220328055449.8a30774a61f3b298e778ae68@sohara.org> In-Reply-To: <772cf4b0-9e26-3126-ec4b-bd91986883dd@kicp.uchicago.edu> References: <38b7f44-6d54-fec6-c1f0-d3609d301687@safeport.com> <20220327132420.201da20c@archlinux> <20220327212421.adaee52ba708a058e5ef6bd8@sohara.org> <4f3edca7-45ec-b8ae-45dc-9648cced9bfe@kicp.uchicago.edu> <772cf4b0-9e26-3126-ec4b-bd91986883dd@kicp.uchicago.edu>
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On Sun, 27 Mar 2022 21:31:50 -0400 Valeri Galtsev <galtsev@kicp.uchicago.edu> wrote: > Please, ignore my rant below. I figure, I have to learn reading > carefully, before writing something. Oh not completely - you make some very good points about nVidia. > Thank you, Steve for deep insights of all your posts, including this one > which I ranted about without even disagreeing with your points. Shame on > me. Hey you noticed - I've known people to rant in violent agreement for several posts before I gave up trying to tell them we're saying the same thing :) > > NVIDIA never releases the details of their chip internals. Therefore, > > no open source driver can [legally] be written which is capable of, It can, but the reverse engineering to make it possible has to happen in a jurisdiction where that is legal. Even then though it's guess and hope work without the specs. > > say, have dual screen with different screen resolutions, as there is no > > specs/description of how video RAM is mapped... ATI had always been > > open about chipsets' internals (don't know how things changed when > > developing continued after AMD bought them out), and therefore open I believe they've kept the policy but ... > > source drivers were extremely good. Now, NVIDIA's [proprietary] drivers > > are actually written by NVIDIA itself. For those systems which NVIDIA Which makes them very good indeed and enables the nVidia drivers for DRI/DRM to be available as well tested fully developed drivers the day the cards come out, while the ATI/AMD open source developers don't get to start on their code until later in the cycle. > > prefers. I am just ranting about Steve words of Linux catching up with > > Windows. Respectfully disagree - very first time probably disagree with Nope, you're right in the case of nVidia Linux and Windows are head to head - for pretty much everything else Linux plays catch up with Windows but does a better job on standards and so has less catching to do than might be expected (often Windows needs a driver and Linux uses generic code - FreeBSD does this pretty much as well as Linux IME). FreeBSD plays catch up here though because the DRI/DRM development is done on Linux and when that changes messily (as Linux things tend to) there's a lot of work to do bringing it up to date. Now to pull out the crystal ball and wax philosophical for a bit. It seems to me that the BSDs are remaining what they always intended to be, accessible unix systems - which means servers and workstations and are sticking pretty closely to the original unix philosophy. The Linux based OSs OTOH seem to be going in multiple directions exploring the phase space of operating systems based on a solid multi-tasking kernel with excellent hardware support. This seems to me to be a good thing to do. At one end we have embedded systems in everything from washing machines and TVs to cars and aircraft by way of industrial machines. It's scary the number of things that can be tortured into giving a shell prompt. Becoming more visible we have Android, ChromeOS etc. on watches, phones, tablets and lightweight laptops. Then the various desktop Linuxes (which are getting less and less like unix systems and more and more like turnkey appliances with every release) in the middle. On the large scale Kubernetes, Docker and VmWare ESX create a very different world in which services are orchestrated and fifty lines of yaml turns into several thousand VMs running an auto scaling distributed mass of services, clients, load balancers and VPNs at the click of a mouse and scientists hook up hundreds or thousands of machines with high end graphics cards in them to run massive neural networks. This spreading family of OSs has pretty much abandoned traditional unix philosophy while hanging on to as many of the bits of unix as they find useful. I expect this trend to continue and the divergence to widen between the various members while still retaining the same kernel and a large pool of software to use as common building blocks. Apple, as ever, are in their own walled garden using an eclectic mix of Mach, BSD and proprietary software on carefully selected hardware. Few seem to want to take Darwin anywhere. I'd love something for X11 that handles changing arrangements of multiple monitors as well as MacOS - it's nearly perfect and I'm pretty sure the failures are bugs. I'd *hate* to try and write and debug one - it's a hard problem that's nearly all edge cases, so hard that I despair of even writing bug reports that clearly describe precisely how it goes wrong and when. Plan 9 and Inferno are attempts to take the unix philosphy to extremes - they're elegant in many ways but few want to use them. Personally I like traditional unix and I'm very glad that I'm able to do pretty much everything I need in a well supported traditional unix. So thank you FreeBSD team for providing me with 29 years of great computing experiences - long may it continue. What I like even more is that we have all this choice - and I've only glossed over the tip of the iceberg that is the incredible wealth of free software available today. My turn for a rant :) To those of us who once despaired of saving up the thousand[1] or so a *binary* unix license without networking, compilers or text processing suites (throw in another couple of hundred each for those) or spent weeks getting X11R5 to work on an unsupported platform (you may imagine how good it was to see that X move on a black screen for the first time after weeks of fighting library, compiler and make limitations) complaints that what's available for free lacks the gloss and polish of commercial software seem churlish and ungrateful. [1] Dollars or pounds depending on which side of the pond - the numbers were about the same just the sign changed. -- Steve O'Hara-Smith <steve@sohara.org>
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