Xfree GL still does not coexist with the nVidia drivers

[Mike A. Harris]

On Fri, 17 Oct 2003, Elton Woo wrote:

>> Unless someone can genius up an acceptable and reasonable
>> solution which doesn't have high implementation or package
>> maintenance costs, then the existing solution will more or less
>> remain.
>>
>> Nvidia doesn't seem to even care, as they just blow away random
>> rpm installed files on a whim anyway.  Perhaps I should have rpm
>> postinstall scripts mark the files immutable or something.
>... if you think this would do it ...
>
>I'm starting to wonder if my next video card upgrade should be
>an ATI or Matrox instead. Both are made in Canada, and Matrox
>is in  Montreal West.

ATI is going to shift in the future to use the standard Linux 
kernel AGPgart most likely, and also use the standard Mesa libGL 
that comes with XFree86.  They shipped their own agpgart in the 
past because there were fixes needed for certain chipsets out 
there, etc. which while they may or may not have been in the 
mainstream Linus kernels, weren't always in every distributions 
currently supported kernels.

By shipping their own agpgart they ensured that it was what they
expected.  Current agpgart in the Linux kernel is pretty updated
now, plus distributions are more likely than not, going to
compile agpgart non-modularly for technical reasons, which has
the side effect of not allowing a 3rd party agpgart without
complete kernel recompilation.  It's beneficial to everyone all 
around if there is one single agpgart implementation however, and 
ATI seems to be interested in going down this road in the future 
which is a good thing.

For the libGL, ATI has used Mesa libGL, but with their own DRI 3D 
driver.  They modified libGL to add functionality not present in 
Mesa libGL at the time, however I've been told that the current 
Mesa 5.0 code seems to have the necessary functionality more or 
less, so it's likely in the future the ATI binary drivers will 
use more and more open source components and the binary portion 
will be less separate components to have to deal with.  It'll 
more or less result in a single XFree86 2D module, 3D DRI module, 
and a kernel module.

Hope this helps.





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