Kernel 2054 breaks nvidia.ko loading

[Mike A. Harris]

Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-03-18 at 12:33 -0500, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> 
>>Jeff Spaleta wrote:
>>
>>>On 3/17/06, Gilboa Davara <gilboad at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>What alternative are you offering to power our Xgl/Bling/what-ever
>>>>desktops? (Let alone running Quake4 at 1600x1200...)
>>>
>>>
>>>Doesn't the intel graphics sets now provide enough open support for bling?
>>
>>So, everyone who wants to have Bling is then forced to purchase an
>>Intel motherboard with Intel CPU?  Thanks, but no thanks.  
> 
> maybe the other question is: if it's not possible to deliver an open
> source desktop bling for a wide enough range of hardware.. is it then
> worth doing the bling at all ? or should the bling be rethought to work
> with open source X and kernel ;)

Wether it's worth doing it or not depends on wether the people who
are doing it think it's worth doing I guess, and they seem to think
it is.  I'm inclined to agree with them.

Having open source driver support with which the bling can do it's
thing on top of is an orthagonal issue.  Right now it is working on
many of the OSS drivers already, and will probably work on all hardware
we have 3D support for in time.

Suggesting bling isn't worthwhile, is like suggesting OpenGL has not
been worthwhile in Linux for the last 5 years IMHO.  It's worthwhile,
and some people can use it, while others can not, depending on wether
their specific hardware is supported or not, and how stable and
reliable the support is.

While I'm not sure what the future holds for us in terms of open source
3D driver support for various vendor's hardware, I do know that there
is almost no chance in hell of the eye-candy bling bling work being
done is going to stop.  That work will continue.

That means one of 3 things in the future:

1) We'll see less and less open source 3D driver support, and over time
more and more people will be forced to use proprietary drivers, or to
give up the new eye-candy features of the modern desktop.

or

2) Things will stay more or less status quo, with OSS support plodding
along at a snails pace for new hardware, but enough progress being
made either by hardware vendor contributions, or reverse engineering
to keep at least some people happy enough with OSS drivers, while other
people end up happier with proprietary driver support.  This is the
"current" state of things IMHO.

or

3) We'll start to see hardware vendors co-operate more with the OSS
community and provide more OSS support for their hardware, or work
more closely with OSS developers, providing specs and/or code, etc.



Right now, we are experiencing #2, with tendencies towards #1, however
we really don't know for certain what the future holds.

Having said that though, regardless of which of the 3 scenarios above
happen (or even some other scenario), I very highly doubt we'll see
people all stop working on cool 3D eye-candy features in the X Window
System.




-- 
Mike A. Harris  *  Open Source Advocate  *  http://mharris.ca
                       Proud Canadian.