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Surprisingly - they have a working driver for FreeBSD. Never had an issue with it - and the performance is fantastic. As far back as early 2000's I remember ins

by tony 6y ago

Surprisingly - they have a working driver for FreeBSD. Never had an issue with it - and the performance is fantastic. As far back as early 2000's I remember installing proprietary nvidia drivers on Linux and playing UT2004. Maybe Nintendo/Sony uses Nvidia cards on their developer machines? I imagine FreeBSD drivers aren't simply altruism on their part. On the other hand, stagnation on other fronts: - Nouveau (tried recently) is basically unusable on Ubuntu. As in the mouse/keyboard locks every 6 seconds. - Proprietary drivers won't work with wayland And since their stuff isn't open, the community can't do much to push Nouveau forward.

gautamcgoel 6y ago
Is the FreeBDD driver open source? Also, somehow I was under the impression they stopped maintaining the FreeBSD driver. Is that correct?
- Conan_Kudo 6y ago
  They did. The proprietary NVIDIA driver is required on FreeBSD as well. The FreeBSD community just doesn't care about this.
- magic_quotes 6y ago
  > impression they stopped maintaining the FreeBSD driver. It's maintained while simultaneously not receiving any new features.
  - throwaway2048 6y ago
    Note this includes support for newer cards, so its only a matter of time before FreeBSD support is EOL'd
    - magic_quotes 6y ago
      New cards are fully supported. Why do you think they aren't?
    - loeg 6y ago
      https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/163239/en-us https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/163239/en... The latest FreeBSD driver is 450.66, published 2020-8-18. Supports RTX 20xx, GTX 16xx, GTX 10xx, and older.
phire 6y ago
Nvidia's "Blob" approach does have an advantage when it comes to supporting random OSes. It's less of a driver and more of an operating system. Basically self-contained with all the support libraries it needs. Super easy to port to a new operating system and any driver improvement work on all OSes. But the approach also has many downsides. It's big. It ignores all the native stuff (like linux's GEM interface). It also has random issues with locking up the entire system. Like if you are debugging a process with the linux drivers, a breakpoint or a pause in the wrong place can deadlock the system.
- magic_quotes 6y ago
  Native Linux stuff is not at all native for FreeBSD. If Nvidia suddenly decides to open their driver (to merge it into Linux), FreeBSD and Solaris support will be the first thing thrown out.
- loeg 6y ago
  You say that, but: Nvidia's "blob" driver doesn't have CUDA, NVENC/NVDEC, nor DDC I2C support on FreeBSD — despite all of this functionality being specific to Nvidia's own hardware, and the support being present in the Linux blob, which runs on a relatively similar platform. If the only differing bits were the portability framework, this would just be a matter of adding missing support. But it isn't — the FreeBSD object file Nvidia publishes lacks the internal symbols used by the Linux driver.
  - magic_quotes 6y ago
    > If the only differing bits were the portability framework, this would just be a matter of adding missing support. But it isn't — the FreeBSD object file Nvidia publishes lacks the internal symbols used by the Linux driver. In fact it is. For Linux and FreeBSD Nvidia distributes exactly the same blob for compilation into nvidia.ko; the blobs for nvidia-modeset.ko are slightly different. (Don't take my word for it, download both drivers and compare kernel/nvidia/nv-kernel.o_binary with src/nvidia/nv-kernel.o.) Nothing is locked in the closed source part.
    - 6y ago
dheera 6y ago
The proprietary driver also doesn't support fractional scaling on 20.04 and I've been waiting ages for that.
zamadatix 6y ago
Not just developer machines e.g. the Nintendo Switch uses an Nvidia Tegra X1 and run FreeBSD. Lots of game consoles do, you don't have to worry about the GPL.
- Shared404 6y ago
  I thought the switch ran a modified form of android, but just looked it up and found this on the Switch Wikipedia page: > Despite popular misconceptions to the contrary, Horizon [The switch software's codename] is not largely derived from FreeBSD code, nor from Android, although the software licence[7] and reverse engineering efforts[8][9] have revealed that Nintendo does use some code from both in some system services and drivers. That being said, at least one of the Playstation's runs a modified form of FreeBSD. Edit: add [The ... codename]
  - zamadatix 6y ago
    Very interesting, thanks!
loeg 6y ago
The FreeBSD blob driver will drive a monitor, but it lacks a bunch of GPU hardware support the Linux one has: all of CUDA, NVENC/NVDEC, I²C DDC, and certainly more.
- non-entity 6y ago
  I knew it was too good to be true.

by tony 6y ago

gautamcgoel 6y ago

Is the FreeBDD driver open source? Also, somehow I was under the impression they stopped maintaining the FreeBSD driver. Is that correct?

Conan_Kudo 6y ago
They did. The proprietary NVIDIA driver is required on FreeBSD as well. The FreeBSD community just doesn't care about this.
magic_quotes 6y ago
> impression they stopped maintaining the FreeBSD driver. It's maintained while simultaneously not receiving any new features.
- throwaway2048 6y ago
  Note this includes support for newer cards, so its only a matter of time before FreeBSD support is EOL'd
  - magic_quotes 6y ago
    New cards are fully supported. Why do you think they aren't?
  - loeg 6y ago
    https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/163239/en-us https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/163239/en... The latest FreeBSD driver is 450.66, published 2020-8-18. Supports RTX 20xx, GTX 16xx, GTX 10xx, and older.

phire 6y ago

Nvidia's "Blob" approach does have an advantage when it comes to supporting random OSes. It's less of a driver and more of an operating system. Basically self-contained with all the support libraries it needs. Super easy to port to a new operating system and any driver improvement work on all OSes. But the approach also has many downsides. It's big. It ignores all the native stuff (like linux's GEM interface). It also has random issues with locking up the entire system. Like if you are debugging a process with the linux drivers, a breakpoint or a pause in the wrong place can deadlock the system.

magic_quotes 6y ago
Native Linux stuff is not at all native for FreeBSD. If Nvidia suddenly decides to open their driver (to merge it into Linux), FreeBSD and Solaris support will be the first thing thrown out.
loeg 6y ago
You say that, but: Nvidia's "blob" driver doesn't have CUDA, NVENC/NVDEC, nor DDC I2C support on FreeBSD — despite all of this functionality being specific to Nvidia's own hardware, and the support being present in the Linux blob, which runs on a relatively similar platform. If the only differing bits were the portability framework, this would just be a matter of adding missing support. But it isn't — the FreeBSD object file Nvidia publishes lacks the internal symbols used by the Linux driver.
- magic_quotes 6y ago
  > If the only differing bits were the portability framework, this would just be a matter of adding missing support. But it isn't — the FreeBSD object file Nvidia publishes lacks the internal symbols used by the Linux driver. In fact it is. For Linux and FreeBSD Nvidia distributes exactly the same blob for compilation into nvidia.ko; the blobs for nvidia-modeset.ko are slightly different. (Don't take my word for it, download both drivers and compare kernel/nvidia/nv-kernel.o_binary with src/nvidia/nv-kernel.o.) Nothing is locked in the closed source part.
  - 6y ago

dheera 6y ago

The proprietary driver also doesn't support fractional scaling on 20.04 and I've been waiting ages for that.

zamadatix 6y ago

Not just developer machines e.g. the Nintendo Switch uses an Nvidia Tegra X1 and run FreeBSD. Lots of game consoles do, you don't have to worry about the GPL.

Shared404 6y ago
I thought the switch ran a modified form of android, but just looked it up and found this on the Switch Wikipedia page: > Despite popular misconceptions to the contrary, Horizon [The switch software's codename] is not largely derived from FreeBSD code, nor from Android, although the software licence[7] and reverse engineering efforts[8][9] have revealed that Nintendo does use some code from both in some system services and drivers. That being said, at least one of the Playstation's runs a modified form of FreeBSD. Edit: add [The ... codename]
- zamadatix 6y ago
  Very interesting, thanks!

loeg 6y ago

The FreeBSD blob driver will drive a monitor, but it lacks a bunch of GPU hardware support the Linux one has: all of CUDA, NVENC/NVDEC, I²C DDC, and certainly more.

non-entity 6y ago
I knew it was too good to be true.