Possibly offtopic : Binary only driver
Michael A. Peters
mpeters at mac.com
Sun Nov 21 21:14:23 UTC 2004
On 11/21/2004 11:44:39 AM, Stephen Pollei wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-11-21 at 07:40, Mike Hearn wrote:
> > On Sun, 21 Nov 2004 16:29:12 +0100, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> > Sometimes the choice is like this.
> > I bought a 3D game. I want to play it.
> > a) Go back to Windows
> > b) Use a binary driver on Linux
> Well I haven't used windows for years and don't plan on starting up
> again. I also will not allow a binary-only module in my kernel.
Exactly my position - I'm not a kernel developer by any stretch of the
imagination and I won't pretend to know whether or not the Linux Kernel
should be done differently, but I am not ever buying a video card again
that does not have a kernel 3D driver.
My VooDoo3 cards just worked. I was happy. They don't work with my
current mobo, so I bought an NVidia card.
I'm using the open source nv.o driver because NVidia's binary driver
didn't always work properly even for 2D stuff. Sometimes it did,
sometimes it didn't.
Sometimes a newer driver from nvidia worked better, sometimes it
didn't.
Maybe I wouldn't have to worry about that if Linux did things the way
things were suggested here, I don't know - but I do know is that my
experience is that hardware with OSS drivers in the kernel almost
always just plain work, and when they don't just plain work - like what
happened with my FireWire driver - it is quickly fixed by people who
work on the kernel every single day.
I don't mind closed source software. I use divx4linux on my system
right now - but divx4linux isn't going to bring the system down if it
fails, it is user space.
I think I'm with the kernel people on this one just because I have seen
that their method DOES provide quality drivers, I have not seen the
closed source method provide quality drivers.
Upgrading to WinXP SP2 gave me problems with some drivers, for example
- as did every OS 7/8/9/X update I ever did.
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