On Wed, 2004-06-16 at 19:37, Rui Miguel Seabra wrote: That would be fine if nVidia was the only problem. However, as I said above, the firewire driver that comes bundled with FC2 does not work with this kernel nor do the ndiswrapper or linuxant driverloader packages for the Broadcom wireless drivers. I understand the desire for efficiency, but efficiency doesn't do users much good if their devices don't work. OT - I searched the fedora-devel-list archives using "stack" and got a total of three hits, none of which was on this topic. Apparently the search engine leaves something to be desired. -- Steve Brenneis <sbrenneis(a)surry.net&gt;

On Wed, 2004-06-16 at 21:51, Erik Espinoza wrote: I have downloaded the linuxant kernels and installed them. The nVidia drivers and ndiswrapper work after a fashion. However, I just discovered that the sound drivers in FC2 no longer work as well. As much as I would like to reap the benefits of the 2.6 kernel, heigh-ho heigh-ho it's back to FC1 I go. Or maybe I'll try Mandrake. Thanks for your time. -- Steve Brenneis <sbrenneis(a)surry.net&gt;

On Wed, 2004-06-16 at 22:05, Peter Maas wrote: I understand all of this on a philosophical level and from the kernel purist point of view. I guess my point is that the most beautiful kernel in the world doesn't do anyone any good if it won't operate the hardware that is being supplied with most of the systems being sold today. Isn't it the responsibility of the distributions to provide a full O/S that functions on as many systems as possible? Red Hat has certainly never been shy about distributing modified kernels before now. That is more a matter of survival than of purity. Another point: Linux has made great strides with the hardware vendors. A few short years ago, a company like nVidia would never have even considered producing a Linux driver, binary or otherwise. Does it make sense now to get up in their faces and say, in essence, "you will now do things to suit us?" Remember, they have little or no incentive to do anything for Linux. I'm not advocating that Linux should dumb down for the masses and end up being just another M$ Windows, but I think it is a wise team that recognizes every user of their O/S is not interested in being a kernel hacker. I have built my share of custom kernels to suit arcane hardware and I have even written some device drivers myself, but I don't have time to do that constantly and neither do the majority of Linux users. Just my $0.02. -- Steve Brenneis <sbrenneis(a)surry.net&gt;

In a more technical responce. Having the stack size larger than 4K in most cases is not what the developer intended. This change in the kernel has shown that some drivers could have possibly gotten bigger than the previous limit anyway, an many fixes have been applyed to the kernel, this will hopefully bring a higher level of stablity. Myself I use the nv driver and the nvidia driver on my boxes, the nv driver is slow and doesnt accelerate, but it doesnt lock up, on the other hand the nvidia driver is fast, had great 3d acceleration, and randomly deadlocks my box! Since this driver is using over 4K of stack space, when nvidia fixes this, my assumption is that the driver will be more stable. <rant> This is not really different than any other OS vendor. I remember upgrading a service pack on my windows box once, and my old video drivers no longer worked, I had to upgrade to the newest version, which the vendor released a few days after the service pack came out. Tell Nvidia to release a new driver. If nvidia releases a crappy driver for linux and a good driver for windows, linux will look crappy, demand the best. </rant> Peter

On Thu, 2004-06-17 at 09:47, Mike Hearn wrote: Not necessarily. I think they made the drivers to test the waters. Their production of Linux drivers and their assignment of resources to handle maintenance and upgrades will be dependent on the return on their investment. That is simple economics. Community versions of Linux distributions tend to have very short life-cycles. No hardware manufacturer is going to devote resources to keeping up with these life-cycles unless the users of these versions represent a reasonable percentage of their market. If there was such a huge demand, ATI and Broadcom would both have developed at least binary drivers for Linux. Both steadfastly refuse to do so. In fact, the 2.6 kernel isn't exactly new. If the demand existed, it is likely that nVidia would have already developed a new driver that lives within the 4K stack limitation. Good luck, the open source drivers are completely non-functional on the geForce 4 family. If you boot to run level 5, you will see the red screen of death somewhere around the time your root file system is being mounted. If you boot to run level 3 and run startx, your screen will go blank and your system will happily wait until stars burn out for you to hit the power button. I use the open source Radeon drivers on another system and they are barely functional. I don't think it will be possible for anyone to satisfactorily reverse-engineer some of these devices. At least not without risking the ire (and the lawyers) of the manufacturer. That being said, I would be happy to help if anyone is making the effort to produce high quality drivers for some of the devices that are stubbornly Windows-centric. Lawyers don't scare me. Maybe the HP model is the one to suggest to companies like nVidia. They assigned some development resources to create the hpij and hpoj drivers and then handed it over to the community. That way they get the benefit of the ever-growing number of Linux users but they don't have to expend the resources to maintain the drivers for every new flavor of distribution. I think the relationship of HP to Debian for hppa-linux was similar. -- Steve Brenneis <sbrenneis(a)surry.net&gt;

On Thu, Jun 17, 2004 at 10:27:58AM -0400, Steve Brenneis wrote: ATI did, Broadcom did They should be pretty solid for the older radeon cards. For the newest ones and 3D you have to use the ati binary driver right now. nVidia have reasons for doing things they way they do. Don't expect any sudden magical change.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Thursday 17 June 2004 08:23, Steve Brenneis wrote: Did you try ati.com ? http://www.ati.com/support/drivers/linux/radeon-linux.html?type=linux&... I went to 'drivers' and selected 'Linux' then 'Graphics Drivers'. Of course, the ATI drivers don't work well on kernel 2.6, and don't work at all on x86-64 I can't speak to broadcom though. - -- Jesse Keating RHCE (http://geek.j2solutions.net) Fedora Legacy Team (http://www.fedoralegacy.org) GPG Public Key (http://geek.j2solutions.net/jkeating.j2solutions.pub) Was I helpful? Let others know: http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=jkeating

On Thu, Jun 17, 2004 at 11:57:25AM -0400, Steve Brenneis wrote: Why would anyone care if anything older than the 8500 is supported by ATI's binary drivers? The open-source drivers included in FC/RHL have worked fine on everything up to the 8500 since RH8, as I recall. And WTF does this whole thread have to do with Fedora development again? It sounds like a lot of whining about broken drivers for hardware that should have been avoided in the first place. http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Hardware-HOWTO/intro.html#BINARY-ONLY Steve -- Steven Pritchard - K&S Pritchard Enterprises, Inc. Email: steve(a)kspei.com http://www.kspei.com/ Phone: (618)398-7360 Mobile: (618)567-7320

On Thu, 2004-06-17 at 11:43, Alan Cox wrote: See my earlier reply. The drivers were posted in May and there is no support for anything older than the 8500. No joy. Thanks anyway. -- Steve Brenneis <sbrenneis(a)surry.net&gt;

On Thu, 2004-06-17 at 19:41, Per Bjornsson wrote: IIRC the Radeon drivers that ship with FCx do not support TV-out.

On Fri, 2004-06-18 at 02:53, Cam wrote: Thanks for the tip, will try it out sometime. Unfortunately I'm one of those who would like to have both TV-out and DRI working in a single configuration (Radeon 7500 here) :(

On Fri, 2004-06-18 at 20:08, Per Bjornsson wrote: Yep, been there some time ago, I think it was early FC1 or late RH9 days. I even packaged ati.2 (using the binary "distribution") and their kernel-drm stuff, but eventually got tired of random lockups with them. Anyway, maybe getting a bit offtopic, but my point a couple of messages ago in this thread was that what I would like to have isn't doable with the Radeon drivers that _ship with FCx_. I remember seeing some posts on some x.org lists that it may be possible to get the GATOS stuff merged into x.org X11 in the future, but by the time that happens I will probably have upgraded HW already...

On Thu, 2004-06-17 at 21:14, Warren Togami wrote: Gee thanks, Warren. You are such a ray of sunshine. I googled your name and found that you seem to think everyone is a troll. I have not responded to the issues about my luck with the open source Radeon drivers before since it seemed off-topic for the list and I was going to let it die, but since a couple of you have felt the need to make ad hominem attacks, I can't let this go. I have a dual P-III system with a Radeon 64MB DDR (7200) card. I built it a few years ago and put Red Hat 7.x on it. I believe it had the open source Radeon driver at that time. I later upgraded it to RH 8 and then after adding a larger hard drive I did a fresh install of RH 9. During all that time, I had absolutely no problems with video performance. I have used a number of different multimedia applications and even loaded winex on it to show my kids that Linux could play their games. About two months ago, I loaded FC1 on the system and since then I have noted a number of issues with video performance. Text windows have jumpy and erratic scrolling performance, winex seems to have developed a case of hiccups, mplayer occasionally crashes for no apparent reason, and the whole system randomly hangs, necessitating a console switch to kill the X server. Thus my comment that the FC1 driver was working after a fashion. During the life of that system, I have occasionally visited the ATI website and yes, Warren, I have googled for drivers. Apparently I was limiting my search for the 7200 series alone. I heave read hundreds of discussions about ATI's refusal to support Linux drivers including postings made by ATI themselves. After buying a laptop with a Broadcom wireless card in it, I discovered much of the same history with them. I'm trying real hard here not to get my panties in a bunch since I haven't posted to this list before, but I spent three years of my life convincing the major corporation I work for to switch a very large and widely used application to Linux, so no, Warren, I am not a troll. I was just looking for help and I thought some philosophical discussion of whether or not a distribution might consider adapting to the hardware that is prevalent was in order. I can see that is not the direction the Fedora community wants to take and I am fine with that. To the rest of you who were sincere in your responses, thanks and I apologize for this rant. I think this thread has played out. -- Steve Brenneis <sbrenneis(a)surry.net&gt;

On tor, 2004-06-17 at 11:23 -0400, Steve Brenneis wrote: I bought an Asus A7V8X motherboard a year ago with an integrated Broadcom 4401 ethernet interface. To my great surprise there where GPL'ed linux drivers on the CDROM that came with the board. Oddly enough, driver wasn't announced on broadcom's webpage or anything like that, but it was on the cdrom. Later I found out that the driver wasn't too stable, and davem did a complete rewrite with the b44 driver that is included in fedora nowdays but I must say that I'm very happy that broadcom at least did try. /noa -- And the lions ate the christians and the christians burned the witches, and even I am out of explanations -- Ola Salo gpg fingerprint: F3C4 AC90 B885 FE15 344B 4D05 220B 7662 A190 6F09

Hello Steve, Never heard of switching consoles? Hitting the power button because X doesn't start seems kinda unnecessary. Leonard. -- mount -t life -o ro /dev/dna /genetic/research

On Thu, 17 Jun 2004 10:27:58 -0400, Steve Brenneis wrote: Are you sure? I have a GeForce 4MX and it works fine with the nv driver. thanks -mike

On Thu, 17 Jun 2004 17:33:10 +0100, you wrote: Yes, the main difference between the nv and the nvidie drivers are: 1.) The nv driver are very slow in opposite of the nividia driver. 2.) the nvidia drivers only works with the 8kstacks kernels von linuxant. In opposite, the nv driver works with the original fedora kernel. Best Regards: Jochen Schmitt

Once upon a time, Steve Brenneis <sbrenneis(a)surry.net&gt; said: Firewire is disabled in the kernels in the FC2 release (not related to 4K stacks AFAIK, just related to not being in a working state). However the errata kernels have re-enabled Firewire, and it is working just fine for me (external DVD burner). -- Chris Adams <cmadams(a)hiwaay.net&gt; Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.

On Wed, Jun 16, 2004 at 07:03:36PM -0400, Steve Brenneis wrote: You seem to have missed a lot of posts about this issue. Try this link: http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awww.redhat.com%204k%20stack&ie=... -- Karsten Hopp <karsten(a)redhat.de&gt; GPG 1024D/70ABD02C Fingerprint D2D4 3B6B 2DE4 464C A432 210A DFF8 A140 70AB D02C Red Hat Deutschland, Hauptstaetter Str.58 70178 Stuttgart, Tel.+49-711-96437-0, Fax +49-711-96437-111

On Wed, Jun 16, 2004 at 07:03:36PM -0400, Steve Brenneis wrote: There is no firewire driver in the FC2 base kernel. It was only added for the errata kernel because the one from 2.6.5 was too buggy to ship As to the 4K stacks - anything that doesn't run with a 4K stack was in effect already broken, it just happened not to crash too often. 4K stacks and seperate interrupt stacks improve performance and reliability. Alan