TrueOS To Reinvent Itself As New BSD Platform, Downstream Fork Of FreeBSD

[Luke_Wolf]

The way I see it now:

NVIDIA Blob - Works Great
NVIDIA on platforms with no blob - No solution
NVIDIA on Linux (nouveau) - A bit crap (hot and slow)
AMD Blob - A bit crap (breaks with almost every update)
AMD on platforms with no blob - A bit crap (hot and slow)
Intel on every platform - Works Great (but not fantastic performance)

On FreeBSD, yeah I will go for NVIDIA blob for now but I can guarantee they will be dropping it in a few years
On OpenBSD, NVIDIA simply isn't an option but luckily on "non gamer" laptops, they only really provide an Intel GPU anyway.
On Desktops I have been toying with open-source AMD and it actually isn't bad. The open-source radeon driver is rather slow and hot for me but for desktops is the only real choice

C'mon guys after 20 odd years of FOSS / Graphics development, why are we still crawling around the frigging gutter. The open-source drivers are getting better, don't get me wrong, good work is being done. Unfortunately NVIDIA is already attacking them by requiring signed firmware and all that other criminal stuff.

Intel, get off your arse and sell a discrete Intel GPU for desktop computers!

Um... AMD opensource drivers haven't been hot and slow for years now. in fact they're much better and faster than AMD's proprietary driver, and with modern cards the cooling is the same because the kernel driver is the same, and AMD cards got dynamic power management back in 2013. The only reasons to use AMD's proprietary driver are as follows:
1. you want OpenCL.
2. You want to use their faster proprietary Vulkan implementation,
3. Whatever your running needs compat profiles and doesn't work with the open source driver just yet.

We've not been in the gutter for years now as long as you're using an AMD card. It's not a perfect situation yet, but it's also not a bad one, and card support should be picking up much faster now with DC or whatever the current rebrand is having been upstreamed.

[bridgman]

Nvidia is probably requiring signed firmware for the simple reason that without it, criminals would still be selling fake Nvidia cards and damaging Nvidia's brand.

eBay was full of Chinese re-flashed junk where newer BIOS was forced upon much older card. It worked.. but as sane logic tells you, you can never get expected performance from multiple generations older hardware. So it was simple scam. And people fell for it in droves.

The "signed firmware" being discussed is microcode images, not VBIOS images. Using digital signatures to protect part or all of the VBIOS is a bit more of a grey area, I agree. Going back to microcode, there is no reason why signed microcode images can not be published for use with open source drivers - we have been doing that for years.

Um... AMD opensource drivers haven't been hot and slow for years now. in fact they're much better and faster than AMD's proprietary driver, and with modern cards the cooling is the same because the kernel driver is the same, and AMD cards got dynamic power management back in 2013. The only reasons to use AMD's proprietary driver are as follows:
1. you want OpenCL.
2. You want to use their faster proprietary Vulkan implementation,
3. Whatever your running needs compat profiles and doesn't work with the open source driver just yet.

re: #1, I don't know if we explicitly mention it in the docco but AFAIK you can install and run the closed source OpenCL binary on top of the open source packaged driver.