Wrapping up 7.4 (finally)

[Ben Skeggs]

On Fri, 2008-06-13 at 09:14 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Friday 13 June 2008, Daniel Stone wrote:
> >On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 11:12:57PM -0300, pcpa at mandriva.com.br wrote:
> >> BTW I think nouveau, open source, 3d enabled nvidia cards support, should
> >> be available in 7.4, due to large amount of users with these cards...
> >
> >The nouveau driver will be included in a release when the nouveau
> >developers ask for it to be included, rather than explicitly ask for it
> >to not be included.
> >
> >Cheers,
> >Daniel
> 
> The present difficulty in obtaining this driver is what sent me to town 6 months 
> ago for a better ATI card, which it turned out is not supported either, so I 
> reverted to a several year old ati card, which is working reasonably well if 
> somewhat slower than the nvidia cards ran with the binaries, till the kernel 
> people decided that nvidia will give us the stuff to write a driver, or no more 
> nvidia.
> 
> I can see the kernel peoples viewpoint, having personally observed too many 
> instances of odd, unstable behavior while running the binaries.  Not to mention 
> I can't let one of them anywhere near my milling machine due to the nvidia 
> blobs knocking out the IRQ's for many milliseconds when it has work to do.  
> Because its stepper driven, the pulses must be at a very steady rate when the 
> speed rise, and I went from 9 inchs a minute to nearly 35 just by reverting to 
> the vesa driver for an nvidia card.
> 
> I would like to try this new driver, particularly on that machine and would give 
> them feedback on how its working, but when its as hard to download and build it 
> as it is now, that is so not going to happen.
> 
> Tell these folks that hiding their code under a basket is not going to get it 
> tested in the real world.  Put it out there and let us play with it, and it 
> will be ready for prime time a lot faster.  The current situation is not, IMO, 
> justifiable.  Its either dead or its alive, napping in a locked closet doesn't 
> count.
Let me restate this again: We can *NOT* support our kernel interfaces as
the currently are into the future, as such can't do a "release".  As it
is I have a couple of changes pending which we'll need to support 3D on
G8x/G9x chipsets, not to mention memory management.

The code isn't hidden, nor is it any harder to build than building every
other DRM/DDX module in existance (it's *exactly* the same).. If the
lack of binary packages is a problem for you, bug your distro
maintainers and let them deal with regularly changing interfaces.  We
have a lot of issues/features to handle without worrying about backwards
compatibility just yet.

Ben.
>