Re: nVidia users help needed
> Weird. I thought using hardware acceleration would decrease it, not
> increase it...
Not really. Among other things, I think the video card's on-board memory
shows up as system memory in some situations (including, apparently, this
one).
> Is the any chance in a future of an open source driver, ie.
> independent of nVidia's implementation?
In a way, there already is- I'm pretty sure the nv driver which comes
with X is open-sourced, and correspondingly is more stable and
well-behaved. On the other hand, it doesn't support hardware 3D. For
the minority of us who care about hardware 3D, the nvidia driver
probably works well enough that nobody would bother trying to start
from scratch writing one. Moreover, it would be difficult to do so
without running up against IP constraints. Convincing Nvidia that
their value is in their hardware, not their APIs, and thereby
convincing them to open-source the drivers they already have, seems
like the most viable option to me.
> All so, some thing else I found strange: The kernel module is still
> getting used despite the fact I have rebooted and loaded X with the
> standard nv driver. What loads the kernel module?
I'm a little fuzzy on kernel-module auto-loading, but suffice it to say
that it's in some init script somewhere, and isn't really being used. It
will probably go away if you uninstall nvidia-kernel (though I haven't
tried it, so caveat hacker).
> pluto:~# dpkg -s device3dfx-source
> Package: device3dfx-source
> Status: install ok installed
> Priority: extra
> Section: graphics
> Installed-Size: 68
> Maintainer: Zephaniah E. Hull <warp@debian.org>
> Source: device3dfx
> Version: 2000.11.02-0.1
> Depends: make, m4, debhelper
> Recommends: kernel-package
> Description: Device driver source for 3Dfx boards for 2.x kernels
> This package is the source for the 3Dfx device driver to allow access
> to 3Dfx boards without the user having root privileges. It should
> work on 2.0/2.1/2.2/2.3/2.4 kernels and set the MTRR settings
> correctly. It should also work with SMP kernels (2.1/2.2/2.3/2.4).
Bingo. 3Dfx boards. You don't need it- it's just taking up room on your
system.
--
Geoffrey M. Romer
gromer@hmc.edu
---
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right"
-Salvor Hardin
"I can't leave you alone with this man! He might be a tenor!"
-Fred Astaire
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