OT: nVidia driver [was: Wish list]

[Sean]

On Thu, June 9, 2005 8:34 am, Paul A. Houle said:
> 	(i) I've suffered through a lot of graphics cards that were "supported"
> by open source drivers that crashed all the time.  My nVidia card is the
> first one I've had in about six years that doesn't crash when I'm using
> it.  (Sometimes it gets crashed by screensavers,  but that's another job
> for "rpm --erase")

Linux has traditionally been most useful on servers so anyone engaged in
using it as a workstation has shed more blood than others using Linux.  
However, the _vast_ majority of desktop users today can choose a video
card supported by open source which will meet their needs and not crash.  
The constant drum beat of "nVidia binary drivers are the best" completely
misses that point.  Hell there are even open source drivers available for
nVidia.

> 	(ii) There isn't any 3-d card with open source driver support that's
> within an order of magntitue of current nvidia and ATI cards in
> performance

And the vast majority of users won't be using any of that added capacity
and shouldn't be encouraged to use binary drivers when they have no need
to do so.

> 	(iii) I like doing stream programming with the GPU

So you're not exactly a typical user then are you?

> In a lot of ways,  propreitary hardware/software combos from vendors
> like Apple and Sun are starting to look good to me.  Linux has a lot of
> quality problems because much of the hardware it supports is junk and it
> has bad drivers even for good hardware:  for instance,  Apache disables
> the sendfile() system call on Linux because some network cards supported
> by Linux are total crap and can corrupt data when using sendfile() on an
> NFS-mounted file.

Well Apple has just announced they're going to be moving to Intel CPU's so
not sure you want to move in their direction just yet.   Anyway, do
whatever you want, if you don't believe in open source and it's not ready
to service your needs yet, there's no harm in you going and doing
something else.

>  What's terrible is that there isn't any reliable way to know what's junk
> and what isn't.  I'll ask around online and it's like calling your average
> software vendor for support:  "Yeah,  there's a driver for that card,
> it's supported,  it's fine."  A year later I finally find out other people
> are having horrible performance and crashes too -- cold comfort.

Yes there is a reliable way, every RHEL system i've ever installed has
gone completely without a hardware problem.  RedHat is _great_ about
helping you find the correct hardware to meet your needs.

> Yeah sure,  but there are risks everywhere.  You can get hit by a bus
> crossing the street.  Tainted kernel or not,  I've never seen a Linux 2.4
> system running non-scientific workloads on an SMP machines that didn't
> have strange concurrency problems.   There are lots of open source drivers
> that suck -- I'd rather trade a propreitary driver that actually works for
> an open source driver that crashes my machine.

Go nuts, but i'd rather have a working open source driver.

> It might not be fair that good graphic cards are propreitary and that you
> can't make free drivers for 802.11g but the real choice is between being
> pure and being relevant:  you ought to be glad that I'm choosing to run
> Linux with modern graphics cards and modern wireless networking rather
> than choosing to foresake Linux so I can support modern hardware.

Linux is running on some of the most modern hardware around.   Having a
bunch of people hacking in binary crap to Linux does nothing to move it
forward in any important way.

> In some areas that's true.  Name a specific graphics card I should be
> using,  and show me some evidence that it can make it more than two hours
> without a crash and I might believe you.

Sounds like you wouldn't be happy with the open source card I'm using to
write this email now, however it sure suits my purposes and it hasn't
crashed on me ever.

Cheers,
Sean

P.S.  I'm out of this thread.