AMD 64 - What can I do to help?

[Mike A. Harris]

On Mon, 3 Nov 2003, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:

>> Any issues that one might expect from things like ALSA or NVidia
>> drivers?
>
>NVIDIA hasn't published any native 64-bit drivers yet.

Oh?

http://www.nvidia.com/object//linux_display_amd64_1.0-4499
http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_ia64_1.0-4050

What are those then?  ;o)

>I'd be surprised if ALSA was fully 64-bit clean, but I don't use sound
>on my AMD64 systems.

I'd assume that people with 64bit computers are also
using/testing ALSA, and that it's probably not 64bit neglected, 
although I can't say from personal experience as all my 64bit 
systems use 2.4.x


>> I'd like to switch to AMD64 and help with QA and maybe development as
>> well, but i depend on the drivers mentioned above.
>
>I'd say it's a bit too early to expect whiz-bang 3D performance
>on 64-bit AMD64 desktop machines.

For proprietary drivers I'd expect them to be reasonable, but 
one would really have to do specific benchmarks.

For OSS drivers, it's more of a matter of having working MTRR
support that doesn't suck (mostly XFree86 wonkiness for the time
being), and the AGP rate being set properly by the BIOS and 
configurable in CMOS.


>On the other hand, I'd say that the platform is solid for 
>servers, albeit with lots of packaging annoyances if you're
>running mixed 32-bit and 64-bit userland.

File bug reports.  ;o)

-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat