[NTLUG:Discuss] CPU History

[Darin Smith]

On Wed, 2003-01-15 at 15:22, David wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 13, 2003 at 09:37:50AM -0600, Kyle Davenport wrote:
> > I've never had a problem with the couple of 3Com's I've used.   I have to
> > say I never expect any official company support for anything.  It's like an
> > extra present that we can get drivers from Nvidia, for instance.   When
> 
> It's no present from Nvidia, or at least, not any present I want.
> Nvidia's drivers are free beer, but not free speech.  Without the
> technical details of programming their chips, we are forever tied to
> Nvidia.  Our graphics run only at their convenience.  
> 


Indeed.  It's a hassle to upgrade kernels because of this (you have to
compile a new "interface module" everytime).

Also, if you have a kernel oops or panic and you are running a
closed-source driver, nobody will help you, since you are running a
"tainted" kernel.

Thirdly, I seem to have encountered a bug in the NVIDIA driver, related
to me having tons of memory (1.5 GB RAM).  It seems that even using the
HIGHMEM=4G kernel setting, I have problems.  I run out of vmalloc
address space, and some modules won't load, some processes won't start
and in that case I get "kernel: ldt allocation failed" in my syslog.

I've isolated it down to having > 512M RAM and running X with Nvidia's
driver loaded (any version...the latest makes things so bad that KDE
can't even start the panel).  I've reported this, and they are supposed
to send me a patch to track all the allocations it performs, so I can
hopefully help them isolate it, but I haven't heard from them in 2 days.

We'll see what happens.  It is a nicely performing driver, but it would
be best to have a better open-source one.  'nv' just doesn't support
enough card features for me to use it.  And I like to play Quake 3A
sometimes...ok, OFTEN.