BSDs Struggle With Open-Source Graphics Drivers

[Teho]

Well, Intel, AMD, Nvidia and the likes have all fully embraced LLVM/Clang and are making their products fully available to FreeBSD and anyone else adopting the LLVM/Clang infrastructure. -- Whether it's Oracle, IBM, RedHat, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, you name it it appears that no matter amount of cash spent on Linux and it's graphics subsystems ever seems to produce a clean, robust and scalable solution. There is nothing but duct tape everywhere.

Seriously, what the fuck? What does compile infrastucture have to do with a display servers and compositors? I'm not sure if you have noticed that Linux dominates on servers, embedded systems and mobile. None of which need or use X.org (for the most part). For the companies you mentioned desktop matters only to the few. ...and Intel, AMD and Nvidia making the "products fully available" on FreeBSD? Are talking only about LLVM/Clang because AMD and Intel doesn't provide any(?) (graphics) drivers for BSDs. Companies like Google (the second largest contributor to the project) do not work on LLVM/Clang to improve it on FreeBSD but rather make it more suitable for their Linux work. I don't see the connection between LLVM/Clang and FreeBSD.

From what I am seeing, you pour a few billion into FreeBSD's needs and it'll run circles around Linux and the Gnome/KDE Linux centric user base in a fraction of the time it has taken for Linux to get out of its own way.

Yes because like in this case they don't actually have to write the stuff themselves when they can port it over from Linux...

Hell, when Debian is making their entire archive LLVM/Clang ready and FreeBSD ready you know shit is happening in the Linux world that people are getting sick of and your types of rants epitomize it to the core.

Excuse me, what? FreeBSD moved away from GCC because it moved to GPLv3 licence and meanwhile LLVM/Clang matured to the point it was better choise than the old version of GCC. Debian is doing that because they can and generally want to provide as much choise as possible.

[blackout23]

Who needs anything else than basic 2D support on BSD anyway?

[BeardedGNUFreak]

No wonder everyone calls this site 'moronix'...

Running the absolute latest NVidia drivers and doing bleeding edge OpenGL development on FreeBSD 9.1 right now.

No one outside of Linux kiddies gives a shit about the piece of crap Nouveau drivers.

[ChrisXY]

With 10 years of daily Debian Linux Sid I have seen progress and it has been in the form of well over $10 Billion in Corporate Investment into Linux and guess what?

X-Windows, Compositing, etc., are a decade behind OS X. Garbage design from day one.

Garbage? How is garbage so extensible that it still can be made to work relatively easily with a bit of work? If you say that the anti tearing stuff canonical does or the gpu switching stuff red hat does is too late, I would absolutely agree, but it doesn't seem to be X.org's fault. What exactly does it make such "garbage"?

Quartz and Quartz-Extreme replace the Display Postscript with Display PDF and present day OS X 10.8 has OpenGL 3.2 throughout the entire system,

You should mention that that's the highest opengl version the drivers support. If you talk about something being "behind", this should be it.

while Linux continues to piss itself and slowly get OpenGL 2.1 compliance for KDE, and later on OpenGL 3.x and OpenGL ES 3.0 all once again to Corporate Sponsorship.

What do you mean with "OpenGL 2.1 compliance for KDE"? kwin only uses opengl 2 shaders for the effects, so what? Do you have an actual problem with something? At least linux allows third party drivers from amd and nvidia with OpenGL 4.3 support...

Whether it's Oracle, IBM, RedHat, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, you name it it appears that no matter amount of cash spent on Linux and it's graphics subsystems ever seems to produce a clean, robust and scalable solution. There is nothing but duct tape everywhere.

For AMD's and nvidia's proprietary drivers, maybe. Can you expand a bit on why the rest is not "clean", "robust" or "scalable"?

From what I am seeing, you pour a few billion into FreeBSD's needs and it'll run circles around Linux and the Gnome/KDE Linux centric user base in a fraction of the time it has taken for Linux to get out of its own way.

So you are saying that the good developers all go to freebsd instead to linux? Or why should that be the case?

Hell, when Debian is making their entire archive LLVM/Clang ready and FreeBSD ready you know shit is happening in the Linux world that people are getting sick of and your types of rants epitomize it to the core.

I think it's more about giving user's a choice and maybe a bit "because we can". How many people do you know actually use it? As far as I'm aware gcc still produces a bit better binaries than clang/llvm and linux has a bit better performance than the freebsd kernel in many use cases. Maybe that changes in the future, who knows.

But don't pretend llvm/clang is like a hobby project that is soon to be better than gcc that is supposedly funded with billions. As far as I know clang/llvm also has some major supporters and funding, e.g. Apple.

[Mike Frett]

I find that it's really sad we are arguing with each other, communities of Alternative Operating Systems need to pull together and stop fighting. I don't know if any of you realized it yet, but you got Microsoft riding all our backs trying hard to pull some 007 stuff on us and wipe us out. Fighting each other only gives them more hope that we will be destroyed.

And yes, BSD has some real issues and I think it comes with the territory, meaning Linux is quickly rising and BSD seems to of lost out quite a bit. It's sad, but what you BSD guys need to do is assess the situation on your end and embark on some workarounds. Put your heads together, I believe you can do it. Losing a member of the Free Software community would be a bad thing, I wish you all the best of luck.

[Akka]

Do anyone besides a few hobbyist care about bsd anymore? (no osx isn't bsd)
I get the impression they lost most of the support they had in the server market? Is Yahoos use is shrinking?
Besides some embedded stuff is it used anywhere in notable number commercially today?

[Rigaldo]

@Marc Driftmeyer
Too bad FreeBSD uses an even older version of what you call garbage, huh?
Mostly everything else is already mentioned, BSD is busy porting Linux stuff (specifically software that has sometimes existed for months/years) and apparently it takes less time than developing from scratch, indeed.
Btw, last time I checked neither FreeBSD or OpenBSD had Quartz. Nor WDDM for that matter. The OSes that do have those are anything but "Free" and "Open" though ..

[yogi_berra]

Who needs anything else than basic 2D support on BSD anyway?

Linux users. They are lost without a gui.

[tangram]

I think we can all agree on one thing: this forum is in serious need of moderation. Reading some of the posts in this thread makes me wonder how mankind even left caves.

[onicsis]

The biggest threat to Linux is not BSD, Mac OS or even Windows is EVIL Patent System. Large companies like Google IBM or HP, Linux friendly in day to day life, support that system who threatens in the long term the entier Open Source World.

Flamewars like Linux vs BSD should not ever exist.