Andy Ritger and Christian Zander from NVIDIA talks about FreeBSD drivers

[sobkas]

Two days ago Andy Ritger and Christian Zander were interviewed by BSDTALK http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com.

In this short interview NVIDIA developers were supposed to talk about FreeBSD drivers.

Fortunately they also talked about driver as whole. So we can hear about development process, interaction witch other developers and even what part of driver they develop(and many more). There is answer why they started development of UNIX drivers(42).

In short this interview answers many question. But as this is about FreeBSD there was not enough time to talk about other operating systems in detail.
More information can be found in interview:

http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/2006/07/bsdtalk054-interview-with-andy-ritger.html

ps.
So maybe Phoronix can also interview them?
And allow readers(of Phoronix) to choose questions.(It's just an idea)

[Shadewalker]

I doubt they're interested - at the moment at least. The interview is related to an email they sent out to FreeBSD dev mailing list, requesting certain kernel features for their FreeBSD driver to use.

I like your suggestion as far as user questions are concerned, and I think it could be realized in the future, but for now they probably want a break. It wouldn't necessary have to be an audio interview.

[Michael]

I haven't talked to Christian Zander in quite a while, however, if there's any questions you would like answered by him or the NVIDIA Linux team, just post them in this thread. I'll try to get them in an interview fashion, or at the very least get him to post answers to your questions in this thread.

[sobkas]

The interview is related to an email they sent out to FreeBSD dev mailing list, requesting certain kernel features for their FreeBSD driver to use.

I have read that email and part of that thread so I know about it. And I can only say it was nice to see NVIDIA developers working with community to fix some problems. Maybe they can also work with Linux community in the same way(or similar)?

I like your suggestion as far as user questions are concerned, and I think it could be realized in the future, but for now they probably want a break. It wouldn't necessary have to be an audio interview.

No one said it must be now or an audio interview.
But now we can at least chose the questions.

[sobkas]

And the questions are:

1.When we can see Xen support?
2.Do support for other Linux branches(-rt for example) is planed in the near future?
3.Do unstable ABI in Linux make development harder? Do opening some parts of driver is caused by it?
4.How you treat ABI or API changes in Kernel and X?
4a.Development of nv driver is somewhat slow. When we can see EXA support.
5.Why there is no public shoulder on releasing new version? Is it caused by fact that you are part of other development teams and don't know how much time can be spent on UNIX development?
6.How about beta versions of drivers. I have heard that there is no point in releasing them because to make them more useful than normal version in squashing bugs they need to include debug symbols and it is no option due to IP problems. And if betas are not better, the normal versions are good enough.
7.Is there any interaction with distributions developers(native packages)?
8.I have heard that drivers are encrypted. Is it true?
9.What do you think about some voices saying that distributing your driver(in way that automatically loads it into the kernel, like in some livecd) is GPL violation?
10.Do you think that your driver breaks GPL?

Just few questions.
ps.
Interview would be better(and more people would actually read it). And please don't send them now. I believe that posting more questions in this thread and choosing the best(maybe a poll) is a good idea.
ps2.
Maybe FreeBSD interview is worth an article?

[Shadewalker]

Maybe they can also work with Linux community in the same way(or similar)?

As far as kernel development is concerned, they already do. Recently, there was a new kernel function implemented (possibly by Linus himself, unless I misundersood the changelog entry) which was requested by nVidia. I can't recall *when* exactly, but you might be able to look it up if you're interested.