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I recently went and installed FreeBSD on my laptop. It has until now been a pretty good experiance. The main reason I went with FreeBSD over OpenBSD at the mome

by erk__ 6y ago

I recently went and installed FreeBSD on my laptop. It has until now been a pretty good experiance. The main reason I went with FreeBSD over OpenBSD at the moment was that NVIDIA only supports FreeBSD. FreeBSD is also pretty simple (at least compared to linux) so it wins there as well.

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
By NVIDIA supporting FreeBSD you mean that half-assed thing with binary drivers allowing you to get a picture, but no CUDA? Or is that old information which i should forget?
- magic_quotes 6y ago
  Unfortunately, half-assed vendor support is still quite compelling compared to no vendor support.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    It depends on your use-case, i guess. If my intent would be using FreeBSD as my daily-driver "desktop/laptop-OS" i'd avoid NVIDIA like the plague, becaue without CUDA their unique selling point does not exist, but the hassle of some "switcheroo-black-magic" possibly persists. Which i wouldn't have with an intel-gpu, also less power draw. Even AMD is often supported in a better way, be it opensourced, or relying on their binary blob.
    - magic_quotes 6y ago
      > Even AMD is often supported in a better way, be it opensourced, or relying on their binary blob. AMD binary blob? You mean that amdgpu-pro thing? That doesn't exist on FreeBSD.
      - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
        Maybe not the latest and greatest "Pro", but otherwise? https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/AMD-GPU-Matrix https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/AMD-GPU-Matrix edit: maybe should have added https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/#index5h2 https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/#index5h2 too
- loeg 6y ago
  Sure, the factual parts of that are accurate. Your opinion colors some of the adjectives. OpenGL works well, for example. No CUDA, no NVENC/DEC.
  - erk__ 6y ago
    Well it is a bit of a grey zone but I have gotten Vulkan to work and I think at least NVENC works as well. The solution is rather hacky though. It extracts libraries from the Linux driver and loads them when you run programs. A look at the code make it seems like cuda is getting loaded as well so it may work. https://github.com/shkhln/nvshim https://github.com/shkhln/nvshim
    - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
      While i respectfully congratulate the authors of that shim for their ingenuity, that is no support.
      - chupasaurus 6y ago
        Nothing drastically changed since Torvalds had sended his gratitude[0]. [0] https://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=2997 https://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=2997 (time coded)
        LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
        I concur.
        chupasaurus 6y ago
        Wayland support fiasco, changes in driver's EULA to deny the usage of consumer-grade GPUs in VMs are 2 things off the top of my head.
        floatboth 6y ago

by erk__ 6y ago

LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago

By NVIDIA supporting FreeBSD you mean that half-assed thing with binary drivers allowing you to get a picture, but no CUDA? Or is that old information which i should forget?

magic_quotes 6y ago
Unfortunately, half-assed vendor support is still quite compelling compared to no vendor support.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  It depends on your use-case, i guess. If my intent would be using FreeBSD as my daily-driver "desktop/laptop-OS" i'd avoid NVIDIA like the plague, becaue without CUDA their unique selling point does not exist, but the hassle of some "switcheroo-black-magic" possibly persists. Which i wouldn't have with an intel-gpu, also less power draw. Even AMD is often supported in a better way, be it opensourced, or relying on their binary blob.
  - magic_quotes 6y ago
    > Even AMD is often supported in a better way, be it opensourced, or relying on their binary blob. AMD binary blob? You mean that amdgpu-pro thing? That doesn't exist on FreeBSD.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
      Maybe not the latest and greatest "Pro", but otherwise? https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/AMD-GPU-Matrix https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/AMD-GPU-Matrix edit: maybe should have added https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/#index5h2 https://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature/#index5h2 too
loeg 6y ago
Sure, the factual parts of that are accurate. Your opinion colors some of the adjectives. OpenGL works well, for example. No CUDA, no NVENC/DEC.
- erk__ 6y ago
  Well it is a bit of a grey zone but I have gotten Vulkan to work and I think at least NVENC works as well. The solution is rather hacky though. It extracts libraries from the Linux driver and loads them when you run programs. A look at the code make it seems like cuda is getting loaded as well so it may work. https://github.com/shkhln/nvshim https://github.com/shkhln/nvshim
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    While i respectfully congratulate the authors of that shim for their ingenuity, that is no support.
    - chupasaurus 6y ago
      Nothing drastically changed since Torvalds had sended his gratitude[0]. [0] https://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=2997 https://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=2997 (time coded)
      - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
        I concur.
        chupasaurus 6y ago
        Wayland support fiasco, changes in driver's EULA to deny the usage of consumer-grade GPUs in VMs are 2 things off the top of my head.
        floatboth 6y ago