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Other BSD and UNIX/UNIX-like Any other flavour of BSD or UNIX that does not have a section of its own. |
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A question about DragonFlyBSD and NVIDIA
Hello all, this is my first post so I'm hoping I put this in the right forum. Anyway, I am a Linux user looking to switch to either DragonFlyBSD or OpenBSD; I have played with FreeBSD in the past but have decided I would rather go with a different option. Here is the problem, though; my video card is an NVIDIA GTX 550 Ti. The reason I bought this card two years ago is that NVIDIA's proprietary driver for Linux and FreeBSD is quite good, and everyone on the FreeBSD forums and over at linuxquestions.org recommend NVIDIA.
Well, after reading posts on this board, I realize how wrong I was. But until I can afford another card, I've been trying to figure out whether it is possible to use the FreeBSD NVIDIA driver on DragonFlyBSD (I know I'm going to have to go with ATI if I want decent performance on OpenBSD). I saw on phoronix that the Radeon driver had been ported to DragonFly: Quote:
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1. Has anyone gotten an NVIDIA card functioning decently on DragonFlyBSD or OpenBSD with a card similar to mine? If so, could you give me some pointers, googling and digging through the mailing lists hasn't helped me much other than getting responses of "Buy an ATI card", which I plan on doing, but until then I'm stuck with this card. 2. Specifically in the case of DragonFlyBSD, given that they have ported the FreeBSD Radeon driver, does anyone know if they plan to port the NVIDIA one as well? Part of why I ask is that I dug through their github page, and found nvidia-settings, but not the FreeBSD driver itself. Last edited by guitarfreak; 3rd April 2014 at 11:53 AM. |
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1. I have already installed OpenBSD and DragonFlyBSD sucesssfully on my hardware. Everything is detected, and works, with the exception of that card. The problem is that I can only get a very low quality VGA resolution in 4:3 via the VGA out, my mini-HDMI to HDMI doesn't work at all. I have a a 27" Widescreen monitor that does 1080p, so it's a waste of that card to just use VGA output for me. When I installed FreeBSD with the proprietary driver, I was able to use my mini-HDMI to HDMI and get very good quality with HD videos. I'm not worried about Flash or linuxulator, though, I just want to watch my media files in a decent widescreen resolution. 2. What I'm really trying to do here is settle on a permanent desktop OS. I really like the BSD design philosophy/license, but I'm not wild about ZFS. To be honest my ideal OS would be OpenBSD with HAMMER, I really want to be able to do full disk ecnryption on a next gen file system but I like the philosophy behind that project a lot, I'd just rather not keep using UFS. I liked DragonFly very much as well from what little I toyed with it, though, I don't mean to say the only thing I appreciated was HAMMER. |
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I am sad to hear that you had poor experience with DragonFly but for the record I think that DragoFly is one of more interesting BSD projects and very fine OS. Unfortunately due to the tiny size of the community it is missing some critical peaces of infrastructure necessary for production deployment in larger organization but in my personal experience Hammer is true gem.
Last edited by Oko; 4th April 2014 at 12:41 AM. |
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OpenBSD doesn't have HAMMER. Not yet, and perhaps not for some time to come, if ever.
Until Nvidia provides open engineering interfaces for third party driver developers, you are unlikely to ever see a modern Nvidia driver on OpenBSD. That day may eventually arrive, but it is not yet here. |
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Thanks for clearing that up. To be honest, I can wait for Hammer if that is a good distance off yet. However, I do have a question about the ATI manual page if you wouldn't mind answering. Of the models listed at the OpenBSD radeon Manual Page for current, I see it stated that
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Also, sorry if I'm taking this thread a bit off topic, I'm still very interested to know if there is any way possible to get that NVIDIA driver working on DragonFly. Considering that Nouvea doesn't use nvidia-settings/nvidia-utils, I'm wondering why it's there on the github page if they aren't planning on it being useful in the future? |
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I beleive you mean radeon(4). The ati(4) man page is for legacy ATI devices.
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FYI - Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) was added to inteldrm(4) with OpenBSD 5.4, and KMS was added to radeondrm(4) for OpenBSD 5.5, which will be released in four weeks. |
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Distance: Not even on the horizon. At this point, the only activity I'm aware of is a solicitation by the project for a feasibility study under GSOC 2014. If a study is undertaken, and if a successful study shows portability is feasible, I would not expect to see HAMMER or HAMMER2 integration for some years. (A study may be successful yet show that porting the filesystem is not possible.) I'm not aware if Bob received any proposals. |
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Last edited by Oko; 4th April 2014 at 12:42 AM. |
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See this post from 2010: Quote:
Edit: Just closing this thread out, John was good enough to get back to me very quickly on the mailing list. Here was his response: Quote:
Last edited by guitarfreak; 4th April 2014 at 08:24 AM. |
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For all practical purposes DragonFly BSD is amd64 system only. i386 is being phased out. Have you tried amd64? I am actaully really surprised to hear that you got it going in VM as DragonFly has lots of problems in particular with KVM.
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The i386 system was the only one I downloaded, as I wanted to test it on an Atom N270 system that is not 64-bit capable before migrating to another platform. When it did not boot I moved the install media (USB stick) to another platform, where it failed in the same manner.
I wouldn't call that "phased out" -- rather "inoperable". The booloader would not function. Not debuggable without two machines, cabling, and gdb. I wasn't interested in doing that. The bootloader worked and the kernel booted under emulators/qemu. I tested it there because it was a quick and easy test of the USB stick and the image. I stopped once the dmesg began to appear, and did not run the OS. |
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You have the right idea. If it doesn't work. Replace it*.
For now, if you are lucky, you might have an onboard intel gfx card on your motherboard to fallback to. These things work pretty well with OSS systems. I might like to also remind you that FreeBSD by default uses UFS. So even if you do not like ZFS, FreeBSD should still be a good choice. *Or of course write a driver for it if you are in the position to |
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