On Sun, 2 Jul 2006, Sam Smith wrote:
On Sun, 2 Jul 2006, Michal Mertl wrote:
And - again - it will probably take a couple of very skilled
programmers' years' time to write good driver from scratch.
It took someone far less than that
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/dev/pci/if_nfe.c
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=nfe&sektion=4
Nvidia don't want to give out docs.
That's their commercial decision - as a result, if you their cards, you may
end up with a particularly expensive paperweight the day they decide you
need to buy a new card for your new version of freebsd which has different
internals; or someone finds bugs in their drivers that they wont fix. it's
not like there aren't plenty of other vendors who are more willing to help
the developers with documentation in an open manner.
As I've also pointed out privately, but figure the list might benefit from --
this is a discussion of NVIDIA's video hardware, not network hardware, and the
differences are significant:
Producing a device driver for a network interface is a pretty casual activity,
since network interfaces are often just glorified hardware fifos, and there is
relatively little that distinguishes most low-end cards on the market.
Producing a driver for a GPU card, especially one that possibly converts from
GL-foo to foo appropriate to program and feed an ASIC on a video card, is
quite different matter entirely.
I'm all for open source drivers, and would also encourage NVIDIA to continue
to reconsider their closed source driver approach where it makes sense
(especially for the network interfaces). However, I think that we shouldn't
conflate these two cases rhetorically, as there are orders of magnitude
complexity (and intellectual property) differences.
Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
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