FreeBSD 9.1 Officially Released

[Eisnefaust]

Phoronix: FreeBSD 9.1 Officially Released

While it's arriving late, FreeBSD 9.1 has been officially released just in time for 2013...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI2NTM

The chances getting GPGPU working on FreeBSD via OpenCL are much better with an open source driver than with nVidias BLOB. nVidia is still not willing to support FreeBSD for this very important GPU usage profile even for the scientific area, where FreeBSD doesn't play any real serious role anymore. FreeBSD is now moving forward with LLVM, LLVM now has the nVidia PTX backend they use for their device target binary code generation for CUDA/OpenCL utilizing LLVM, but it is still not applicable on FreeBSD for the usage with the nVidia BLOB or any library, that provides OpenCL (like FreeOCL or POCL). People underestimate how important this usage of GPGPUs become over the past 24 months and it is like an ultimate sentence, whether the operating system will have a future on the open market/the community or getting dumped into a niche product. Niche products do not get much attention and therefore they will vanish over time.

The long-awaited Intel KMS support for FreeBSD is quite exciting though it's a constant challenge of back-porting changes from the Linux kernel. There's also no official Radeon or Nouveau driver KMS/DRM drivers in FreeBSD.

Well, would this fu...ng X11 foundation do its job right - providing a platform independend graphical users interface as they did in the great time of the UNIXes - their wouldn't be this backporting issue. The OSF blames the *BSD to being behind, the *BSDs blame the OSF for being Linux-nailed. It would be of great interest to figure out what's right and where the truth lies. Indicating that, for instance, the *BSDs are behind is KMS: it is said, that this technique is important to get rid of a root-driven Xorg server, and this should be of great concern even for the OpenBSD people. But there is not much efford to create a platform independend solution. So, at least OpenBSD is behind?

On the other hand, people developing on the drivers are obviously Linux-only and a kind of narrow minded when it comes to more broader views and independend solutions. It seems to be a bit as they are only capable of engineering. Well, that is bad, since engineering makes things, that already exist, better, but it makes us never getting beyond it to gain access to new territories - it is like jet engines and rocket engines. All what's done today is clearly engineering.
The great time, when development was mor open and broad-minded is definitely over and an echo of the past. Today it seems everything is Linux-related in a very clumsy way.

[Tinitus]

Some moron starting a GPL vs. BSD trollwar in 3, 2, 1....

[LightBit]

If nVidia bankrupts, open source drivers won't have much use either anymore.

I'm not buying new graphic card every year.

[Cthulhux]

If nVidia bankrupts, open source drivers won't have much use either anymore.

[LightBit]

Unless he is writing drivers, him caring will not matter very much.

Well it does matter, if more people would use open source driver instead of closed one, nvidia would make more effort to open their drivers.
If nvidia bankrupts their closed source driver will soon become useless.

Also unstable API (and ABI) isn't only reason for open source.

[ElderSnake]

inb4 BSD is "gay" and "needs to die" and is "in bed with M$" etc etc and the usual shitfights.

[Cthulhux]

Not that Linux had no binary drivers or something. Open Source is not the ultimate answer to anything.

[ryao]

"I don't care for open source"

Unless he is writing drivers, him caring will not matter very much.

[LightBit]

i don't care for nouveau on freebsd. because like normal OSes, it has a stable API, so binary drivers work properly.

"I don't care for open source"

[garegin]

i don't care for nouveau on freebsd. because like normal OSes, it has a stable API, so binary drivers work properly.