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

[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 Going back to microcode, there is no reason why signed microcode images can not be published for use with open source drivers - we have been doing that for years.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.

[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.

[AndyChow]

The way I see it now:

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

100% this. I don't care if it's slower than whatever nVidia and AMD has to offer. The could put an Iris 6200 on a pcie board, put 6-8 GB GDDR5, and charge me $400, and I'd buy it. Drivers that actually work, OpenGL that's worry free through the goop of GLES and EGL, and the holy grail, GTV-g.

[kpedersen]

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.

Would these things work with the open-source Nouveau drivers? I don't suppose you know the names of any of these Chinese companies? I would love to pick up a few. At this point, I definitely trust the Chinese more than I trust the Israel/Americans.

Good to see NVIDIA using its professional due diligence to come to the conclusion that ~10% of its users (running open-source operating systems) are nothing compared to its "brand" haha. I so wish it would move out of the way and let a "correct" company take its place.

[aht0]

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.

[kpedersen]

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!

[aht0]

Any OS that isn't compatible with n-1 generation of hardware is useless to most desktop and laptop users.

Talk us more about it, please. Like about Linux and flippin' Radeon drivers for it's newest or next-to-newest cards and general myriad of issues around Radeon drivers. Yeah, you could get them working at some level given condition this, this and this and given condition that..

Then about hybrid GPU's which don't want to work with Linux properly at all either. And these could be actually like 10 years old by now and still not working properly.

When you want to use graphics card without head aches, you'd just go and buy Geforce and use it's binary driver..and problem solved.
Oh, it's pretty much the same on FreeBSD.. weird that

We can expect now at least half a dozen die-hards confirming that they have absolutely zero issues with Radeon on Linux and all the problems are actually hiding between screen and a chair. Telling it only because previous article I happened to read was "AMD drivers.. a sad story" at https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...rs-a-sad-story

[kpedersen]

Any OS that isn't compatible with n-1 generation of hardware is useless to most desktop and laptop users.

I don't believe Mac OS X has any better hardware support than FreeBSD and yet that seems to be pretty popular (2018).

Yes, you need to buy the correct hardware from Apple (because presumably the developers use that hardware).
Same with FreeBSD, you need to buy the correct hardware from Lenovo or Apple (because the developers prioritize that hardware).

Laptops are such a non-standards compliant mess of hardware that only if the drivers are provided by the hardware manufacturers themselves (which is what makes Windows so powerful), the machines are effectively broken upon release.

The main difference is that once *BSD supports a piece of hardware, it is good for life. Whereas once Linux supports a bit of hardware, it often regresses for the next few revisions of the kernel.

[Sonadow]

BSD has pretty decent hardware support actually, in most cases the stuff that doesn't work is due to:

Uncooperative hardware manufacturers
Linuxisms in published drivers, requiring the team to rewrite chunks of the code to get it to function (I'm against DFBSD's decision to try and compromise their design for the sake of compatibility)
Bad hardware/drivers

If you go with mainstream hardware that isn't fresh off the assembly line, the chances are pretty good it'll function fine.

Any OS that isn't compatible with n-1 generation of hardware is useless to most desktop and laptop users.

[kpedersen]

With projects like OpenBox -- It knows exactly what the fuck it is trying to be, so much so that it has completed development.

I wish it could complete development but the Wayland kiddies and the Gtk+3 kiddies cannot wait to break a good thing that FOSS has left. A single sane stacking window manager that does not drag in (too) many dependencies.