[ANNOUNCE] Deprecation of xf86-video-nv

[Piotr Gluszenia Slawinski]

On Mon, 29 Mar 2010, Andy Ritger wrote:

>
> On Sat, 27 Mar 2010, Piotr Gluszenia Slawinski wrote:
>
>> 
>>
>>  -- 
>>
>>  On Fri, 26 Mar 2010, Andy Ritger wrote:
>> 
>> > 
>> >  Historically, NVIDIA developed and maintained the xf86-video-nv X 
>> >  driver,
>> > 
>> >  Our advice to owners of NVIDIA GPUs running Linux is to use the VESA X
>> >  driver from the time of Linux distribution installation until they can
>> >  download and install the NVIDIA Linux driver from their distribution
>> >  repositories or from nvidia.com.
>>
>>  then NVIDIA could be so kind and fix the "NVIDIA Linux driver"
>>  to build and work properly with alternate libc implementations, like
>>  uclibc (glibc is hard-linked in libGL supplied with The Driver)
>
> Hello, Piotr.
>
> No, glibc is not statically linked into NVIDIA's libGL.so, if that is what 
> you mean to imply.

no, it just expects glibc being in the system.

> If uclibc provided the same ABI as glibc then I would expect NVIDIA's
> libGL.so to work with uclibc.  However, my understanding is that binary
> compatiblity (either with glibc or even with prior uclibc releases)
> is a non-goal of the uclibc project.

yes, it is not binary-compatible glibc.

> For better or worse, the NVIDIA driver is provided as binary-only,
> so it is not terribly well suited to deal with system library binary
> interface changes.
>
> Sorry,
> - Andy

well, and that is what i'm complaining about...
mind you glibc will not be always binary compatible either across
it's own versions  - same
as libc5 to glibc ("libc6") transition occured ad some point...

this limits nvidia driver usage to specific libc implementation,
with specific version.

nv driver itself served well for i.e. people who could sacrifice
3d performance in i.e. netbooks, where they would rather focus
on battery and storage usage when choosing libc implementation.
if it quits being maintained and users are advised to move to
binary driver - it would be nice to make it actually compile on such
systems...

p.s. why nvidia does not set up some price levels on opening parts
of drivers like i.e. blender coders did?


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