What Will Happen To xf86-video-nv In 2010?

[airlied]

Right yelling doesn't help but yet there are Xorg devs that continue to scream "open the blob" and the likes. This certainly does not make things any better nor does it come across as professional.

This is where I really do disagree. Until the opensource alternatives can match feature for feature and performance wise you cannot claim equality nor say nvidia will only exist for the professional market. When I go to the store I go to buy what gives me the most bang for the buck with the most features that I will use. I will not buy a product based on future planned features as by that time happens that card is relatively outdated. I'm not the only one doing this. One of the big things nowdays for example is video playback and covering the "basics" is not good enough. Vdpau for example made cheap cards that nvidia makes a extremely compelling reason to stick with blobs and their cards. "Flicker free booting" while nice and all doesn't do anything for actual productivity. I have yet to see anybody do any work on a same system that was booting. Same with XRandR support. While it is nice to see X making an attempt to catch up in functionality of what other OS's have had for years, it's still a relatively minor issue as most people no matter what the OS stick to 1 resolution, orientation, spanning. It's a set and forget feature for most people unlike items like accelerated video playback which I guarantee gets heavier real practical use then "flicker free booting" and XRandR mode switching.

Instead of telling consumers "vote with your pocket books" here is a alternative way of doing it (which has been VERY successful for our company which also does opensource). If you have the specs released, instead of saying "consumer pay us to do it" put a hit list out on the features and pay for independents to take on the task. Example:

Users want flaw free accelerated HD playback, put out ads saying such

"$4000 for a working implementation of accelerated x264 playback in the XYZ's brand foss driver, submit code and upon acceptance payment will be made"

If manufacturer's, commercial distro's, etc would do this it would probably speed up development of wanted features. Get those features in there in a timely manner and then people purchasing your products will follow.

I'm not sure which X.org devs have screamed for the blob to be opened I can certainly say I don't know of any, you might want to provide some sort of citation to back your "facts"

My impression is you have made a basic "because I value something it means everyone must think its important" mistake in your logic. Xrandr support wasn't provided for a desktop user to set their PC up once and leave it alone, it was developed for laptop users who plug their laptops into projectors a lot and want to show stuff.

The story is that some Intel exec was doing a Linux demo and realised he couldn't hotplug his monitor on laptop will all Intel parts and he kicked heads due to its unacceptability. (may not be true but it sounds good)

Things happen because ppl want them to happen, if we don't have tearfree video on open source drivers its not because nobody knows how to do it, its because nobody considers it worth doing. For example at Red Hat we can't ship a DVD player with our OS, so why the hell would we invest money in tearfree movie playing? Most Linux users playing movie are playing dodgy legal rips of content from other sources, its not something we get much paying customer demand for at all.

Dave.

[birdie]

They've already told that great many times:

NVIDIA continues adding basic mode-setting support for new GPUs to this driver knowing that it is not widely being used, but that the Nouveau developers will likely look over this code for possible information in supporting new ASICs under their driver (although most of the Nouveau driver is developed through clean-room reverse engineering of the NVIDIA binary driver). This is the approach NVIDIA would use if they wish to not be associated at all with the Nouveau project.

[birdie]

end of 2007 amd-buy-ati and have a plan for making a opensource-driver.

i switch from Nvidia to an amd grafic card in 2007!

if free people, if we wana peace, software peace of Freedome, Nvidia must DIE!

Die Nvidia i hope you DIE!!!!

Dude, you need to grow up and become sober.

[jscurtu]

- NVIDIA just provides no open-source contributions at all for new hardware.

This is what I think will happen, I mean while other Graphic vendors are starting to have very good open source Drivers.. Nvidia still stays stubborn...

This is the receipt for being stubborn and ignorant:
AMD dont want those nforce chips on thier Motherboards anymore and I havent seen any nvidia chips on Intel boards for a long time!!
SLI on nvidia nforce boards only, thats stupid!!...
Hmmm well cross-fire support is on AMD and Intel chips!!!

Seems to me nvidia is on a one man path, with no more partners..

Just my 2 cents..

[deanjo]

I'm not sure which X.org devs have screamed for the blob to be opened I can certainly say I don't know of any, you might want to provide some sort of citation to back your "facts"

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...ly/037098.html

I do not see the point of adding autoconfig for drivers we don't ship
with X.org.

Please ship the driver source with X.org and we can add autoconfigure support.

Dave.

Nuff said Dave.

[deanjo]

My impression is you have made a basic "because I value something it means everyone must think its important" mistake in your logic. Xrandr support wasn't provided for a desktop user to set their PC up once and leave it alone, it was developed for laptop users who plug their laptops into projectors a lot and want to show stuff.

And percentage wise what would you say is the Projector use vs Video playback?

Things happen because ppl want them to happen, if we don't have tearfree video on open source drivers its not because nobody knows how to do it, its because nobody considers it worth doing. For example at Red Hat we can't ship a DVD player with our OS, so why the hell would we invest money in tearfree movie playing? Most Linux users playing movie are playing dodgy legal rips of content from other sources, its not something we get much paying customer demand for at all.

So your playing the DRM bullshit excuse. Sorry but I like alot of others backup our commercial media, have HD camera's which are commonplace nowdays, stream HD video LEGALLY on even youtube stuff, etc etc. You know things that end users do... You start crowing how there are only illegal uses of HD acceleration you are no better then MS and the MPAA screaming the same thing.

[MostAwesomeDude]

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...ly/037098.html

Nuff said Dave.

You may want some context to go with your assertion. Since you likely don't know it, I'll provide it.

Aaron Plattner from nV added a patch to Xserver to autodetect and load nvidia, and was attempting to argue in favor of keeping it. Dave's post is a shorter, more droll version of, say, Daniel's excellent post, found further in the thread: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...ly/037101.html .

Of course, I'm also guilty of the same terse sarcasm and rhetoric, as evidenced by my own contribution: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...ly/037133.html .

Edit: Punctuation fail.

[MostAwesomeDude]

So your playing the DRM bullshit excuse. Sorry but I like alot of others backup our commercial media, have HD camera's which are commonplace nowdays, stream HD video LEGALLY on even youtube stuff, etc etc. You know things that end users do... You start crowing how there are only illegal uses of HD acceleration you are no better then MS and the MPAA screaming the same thing.

Which video codec do you use to encode your video? If it's anything but MJPEG or Theora, it's probably patented in a way that makes it impossible to ship in free distros. Which audio codec? Better hope it's Vorbis, or maybe Speex.

This has nothing to do with copyright and everything to do with software patents.

[tball]

And percentage wise what would you say is the Projector use vs Video playback?

So your playing the DRM bullshit excuse. Sorry but I like alot of others backup our commercial media, have HD camera's which are commonplace nowdays, stream HD video LEGALLY on even youtube stuff, etc etc. You know things that end users do... You start crowing how there are only illegal uses of HD acceleration you are no better then MS and the MPAA screaming the same thing.

Uhm most of us end users are able to run those HD video contents just fine. Recently it works just fine with fglrx also

I would choose xrandr over hd video decoding any day.
Why would I need hd video decoding, if I weren't able to hotplug my plasma tv to my computer, if I already are able to run HD contents decoded with my cpu?

[[Knuckles]]

I would like to introduce a case study: the forcedeth driver.

I know it is a network driver, but it was originally a reverse engineered network driver for nvidia nforce2 network hardware (using it right now on this pc). Nvidia also had its own closed-source blob, but at one point just stopped maintaining it and started contributing to forcedeth.

A link to a bigger version of the story: http://liquidat.wordpress.com/2007/0...rcedeth-story/ .