On Wed, 2005-11-02 at 09:44, Derek Martin wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 01, 2005 at 01:21:15PM -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> > > I sort
> > > of like the idea of having users take the extra efforts to get the
> > > binary only software installed so they at least recognize that there is
> > > a distinction.
> >
> > Yes, especially if they notice that the distinction is that the people
> > who build the hardware do a better job of writing the drivers.
>
> They often don't though. That's the problem, and it's been proven out
> throughout the history of Linux.
>
> Intel took over the maintenance of the ether pro 100 driver. What
> happened? Tranceiver lock-ups when the card got busy. Adaptec took
> over maintenance of the AIC7xxx drivers for Linux. What happened?
> CRASH. And the proprietary NVidia drivers are widely known to crash
> systems... even with kernels that they used to develop and test the
> driver on. Granted, the XFree/Xorg drivers lack the performance and
> some of the features of the proprietary driver, but they also don't
> crash my system. AFAIK, the same is true of the other OSS drivers,
> including the DRI ones.
New code gets new bugs... If you want to try to claim that the
source-available drivers have never had bugs or crashed or been
abandoned, you won't get far since a search of this mailing list
will easily disprove it. Have those bugs been fixed? Were they
triggered by changes in kernel API's?
> The only reason the OSS NVidia driver isn't better than the
> proprietary one is because the vendor won't release the specs to code
> the thing.
Which of the OSS drivers have measurably better performance than
a vendor-written driver on some other OS?
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
