radeon driver heading in wrong direction :-(.
Gilboa Davara
gilboad at gmail.com
Sun Jan 31 18:54:17 UTC 2010
On Sun, 2010-01-31 at 16:35 +0000, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
===================================================
> > I'm using the same binary driver as you are.
===================================================
Do take notice that I -am- using the nVidia binary drivers.
> > - Legacy driver releases tend to lag the "current" driver badly. In a
> > desktop, you could always switch to the latest version, but you laptop
> > still carries a GF5600M, you're more or less screwed.
>
> Umm, my initial comment that spawned this part of the thread was about advice
> on buying *new* cards, not buying *old* cards. If you want to buy an old card,
> feel free to buy a new Intel card instead, you'll get the same level of
> performance.
... I was commenting on Ed's "nVidia is problem free" comment.
(Even though I really admire their efforts to keep their drivers working
and current - and I'm not being cynical)
>
> > - Xen kernel were never supported by nVidia.
>
> You want 3D graphics in a virtual environment? To what purpose? Playing quake3
> on a mail/web/file-server under a virtual machine?
*Cough Desktop virtualization without VT/SVN *Cough
>
> > - Having to compile a kernel without 4K stacks for months, until nVidia
> > added support for it.
>
> As compared to ATI not providing support for current version of X for the same
> number of months and still counting? Tricky question: what is easier ---
> recompiling a kernel, or downgrading X? :-)
See below...
>
> > .... Again, nVidia is doing an admirable job at keeping their drivers
> > stable and current (compared to say, ATI or Intel Poulsbo), but claiming
> > the using them do not come at a price, is ridicules, at best.
>
> Fair enough. But this price is lower then in ATI and Intel case, at any rate.
> It's not perfect, but is just the best offer available.
I do not disagree (hence, I'm using it to power my 7300, 8600 and
9800GTX+ cards...)
I am saying that Kevin is right, in the long run it -will- bite us in
the back-side. It doesn't really matter if it'll happen when Xen gets
integrated into Fedora's -stock- kernel or the next time
Xorg/kernel/glibc completely breaks the API forcing nVidia to rewrite
their driver.
Either way, it's just a matter of time.
Far worse, as we are all using the nVidia driver instead of helping the
Nouveau debug their driver, if/when thing go horribly wrong, switching
to Nouveau driver will be extremely painful to say the least.
As I said before, like me, you can choose to use binary drivers, but
keep in mind that by doing it, were all slowly cutting the branch from
under our collective feet.
- Gilboa
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