Time For A Two-Speed Approach?
Posted by Stuart Herbert @ 8:21 PM, Tue 01 Aug 06
Filed under: Dell Inspiron 8600
8 Comments
Donnie, what’s stopping you having both X.org 7.0 and X.org 7.1 stable at the same time on x86? Is it possible to craft the ebuilds so that, if you choose the opensource drivers, Portage will let you have X.org 7.1, but if you choose the binary drivers, Portage will block any attempts to go beyond X.org 7.0? That’ll allow us to support both types of driver for now.
Instead of the current black and white approach, maybe it’s time for a two-speed approach instead?
I can’t speak for anyone else, but whilst I’ve found the opensource ATI driver fine for your run-of-the-mill 2D GNOME desktop (provided you don’t mind the lack of power management support!), the lack of 3D support limits my use of Linux. This is with a Radeon 9600 M10 card - an obsolete graphics cards from several years ago. I’d love to see ATI and nVidia open their drivers, but until they do, I’ll be a user of the binary drivers as long as they offer features that I need, and that I can’t get from the opensource drivers.
So, c’mon Greg, stop fucking about beating up distros, and go after ATI and nVidia directly. In the Windows world, users are already well-trained in downloading binary drivers from ATI and nVidia. There’s no reason to believe that the same behaviour won’t become the norm in the Linux world (if it hasn’t already). The only way you’re going to put a stop to it is to get ATI and nVidia to honour the GPL by releasing their code. Stopping binary drivers being included in distros won’t win the battle. Folks’ll just download the easy-to-install binary drivers directly from ATI and nVidia instead, and it’ll be in ATI and nVidia’s interest to make them easy to install.
If you’re right in your assertion that binary drivers are illegal, put ATI and nVidia directly in the dock. Enforce the GPL against the source of your problem - the folks making the binary drivers.
8 Comments
August 1st, 2006 at 9:44 pm
Sound like a great idea to me.
August 2nd, 2006 at 3:00 am
Your card oughta work just fine with open-source 3D, the 9600 or so in my iBook does.
On the note of both stable, here is the problem: By the time you’re able to do something about whether they’re using binary drivers, portage has already chosen a version of xorg. There’s no way to say, “Oh you’ve got VIDEO_CARDS=nvidia, so I’m going to drop you back to xorg 7.0.” An easy, but potentially confusing, way to implement this could be a USE-dependent package.mask. Alternately, this might begin to be possible if the “consider deps of installed packages” feature is added to Portage — then, one could just specify that the installed nvidia drivers require xorg
August 2nd, 2006 at 3:01 am
Hrm, it cut off the end there … that was meant to be “xorg <7.1″
August 2nd, 2006 at 4:45 am
The open/closed source driver discussion has been going on for ages, and it’s not going to stop anytime soon I guess. After lots of horrible experiences with both Nvidia and Ati closed source drivers I switched to open source, losing 3D in the process (except for one Radeon 7200 I have). [Mind there's also the unusable Parhelias, for example ...]
Currently that means that I have some sort of “cheese 3D” on a Radeon 7200, a Matrox G550 and some Intel onboard stuff. The rest, including an Ati x800 (not to mention the x1900xt that has the doubtful honor to *only* serve my last bastion of I_won’t_say_what), is 2D only. Very geek :/
It’s a sad story, but forcing anything on somebody who does not have a prime interest in you won’t solve anything. If you boycott them, they will simply stop supplying even those IMHO lousy binary drivers, simply because there’s no market share.
Besides that, the idea of letting the build system decide on the version seems neat to me, it’ll be interesing to see implemented, though.
August 2nd, 2006 at 5:28 am
I was actually at OLS (I have been there every year for 5 years now) and nVidia/ATI was brought up. They are not actually violating the GPL because they distribute the source to a wrapper that loads the binary blob, so technically they aren’t violating the GPL.
August 2nd, 2006 at 7:41 am
Donnie,
$ glxinfo | grep rendering
direct rendering: No
$ tail Xorg.0.log
(EE) AIGLX: Screen 0 is not DRI capable
$ lsmod | grep “radeon”
radeon 116256 0
drm 75288 1 radeon
It’s always possible that I’ve configured something wrong, but I don’t believe that I did. I also checked the DRI project’s webpages [1], and their feature matrix only lists support for R200 chipset cards and older.
[1] http://dri.sourceforge.net/doc/dri_driver_features.phtml
Best regards,
Stu
August 3rd, 2006 at 9:01 pm
Dude you idea is one point of view. But you forget the other, fundamental, one : USERS! Users are the only reason why you code and your main target SHOULD be to create a great user experience.
Opt out binary video drivers is a crazy idea: gentoo users use emerge even to clean their shoes, and you want to exclude one of the fundamental component for a desktop use? Are you serious? Without easy support to 3d will be a jump back of ages…
If you want to see more people embracing Gentoo Linux you have to be coherent, and provide a painless experience to users, for everything! If you start creating exception will be the end of the gentoo painless experience! We are the only ones that made easy and noob proof the installation of 3d games.
On windows you doubleclick and it’s done, on gentoo you emerge nvidia-drivers and it’s done, everywhere else is download, unpack, run installer, damn it fails, oh I have no MTRR support in the kernel and so on…
Stop this integralistic crusade : this looks as mad as a debian-like idea…
An idea could be the creation of a USE flag to activate the support to 3d binary drivers. Don’t remove to users the possibility to choose . Gentoo IS and HAVE TO REMAIN about choise!
August 6th, 2006 at 2:55 am
Maybe something similar to how FreeBSD handles proprietary packages would be appropriate. For instance, if you wanted Java and tried to run “make install,” a messaged would pop up instructing you to fetch the appropriate files from Sun directly. Grab the appropriate download, place it into the appropriate Java port directory, and install the usual way. That way, the user knows what to do but doesn’t have to deal with potentially wonky installation procedures that the original developer came up with.
That said, I think retaining full support for the closed-source drivers would be a much better move, but YMMV. If boycotting Nvidia and ATI for keeping their source closed means placing restraints on my ability to use my video card properly, i’m not really interested in that kind of “freedom.”
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