X 7.1 still testing on x86/amd64 because of BINARY drivers?

frodoontop · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 19 Jan 2004 Posts: 86

Why not let it depend on your settings in /etc/make.conf -> VIDEO_CARDS ?

If nvidia stands among them, don't allow the upgrade. Otherwise just let it upgrade. Or is this not possible with current portage? This would IMHO make everybody happy.
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jmbsvicetto · Posted: Fri Jul 14, 2006 6:00 pm Post subject:

Ast0r · Posted: Fri Jul 14, 2006 9:55 pm Post subject:

I think that the drivers should stay in the testing branch for one major reason: people who are installing Gentoo for the first time should NOT have to mask packages if they install from the stable branch.

It's one thing to say that people using the stable branch can just mask >=xorg-x11-7.1* but that's not easy for people who are just starting out with Gentoo. This will be a major deterent for people who have never installed Gentoo before. Many will understand neither the philosophy nor the technical issues that prevent them from installing Xorg with binary drivers without jumping through hoops to make it work (and new users will consider adding package atoms to package.mask to be jumping through hoops). Faced with the inability to get a GUI working easily, many will abandon their installs in favor of Debian or Fedora.

Do we want to push people away from Gentoo just because they have video cards that don't have open-source drivers?

XenoTerraCide · Veteran Joined: 18 Jan 2004 Posts: 1418 Location: MI, USA

I could care less about binary drivers 7.1 broke evdev for me.
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tamran · n00b Joined: 10 Jan 2004 Posts: 35 Location: Ft. Myers, FL

This is essentially how it is done, the presence of nvidia-drivers and ati-drivers blocks the installation of xorg 7.1. I don't see anything wrong with that. Although, the complaints might be many.

I'm using ATI with the 200m on my laptop, which has pretty useless binary drivers anyways.
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enderandrew · l33t Joined: 25 Oct 2005 Posts: 731

shadowknight · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Aug 2002 Posts: 142

cwest · n00b Joined: 13 Jun 2005 Posts: 72 Location: Oslo, Norway

As a couple of people probably already have pointed out - IMHO Xorg 7.1 should be masked testing on x86 and x86_64 as long as the open drivers aren't on pair with the closed ones - as soon as the open ones are roughly on pair with the closed ones (perhaps not on performance, but at least on support for hardware, stability and features) the binary ones shouldn't hold xorg back.

OGP (OpenGraphics Project) and open xorg-drivers are the ways to go, but untill then - unmasking xorg 7.1 and breaking a crapload of peoples boxes would only produce a lot of unnecesseary support requests.

If the binary drivers aren't going to properly support xorg 7.1 in reasonable time - unmask xorg 7.1 anyway

(if, by xorg 7.2 binary drivers doesn't yet support xorg 7.1, one shouldn't wait any longer for binary drivers IMHO).

I know what I am going to do about it - I'm going to drop binary drivers anytime soon and replace them with the open ones anyway. (One nvidia-box and one ati-box).

Of course - setting the current, broken ati-drivers and nvidia-drivers as blockers for xorg 7.1 might be a way to go, but would probably generate a lot of useless support requests.

Just my simple opinions.
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paulj · Guru Joined: 30 Sep 2004 Posts: 518 Location: Wales, UK

I have just trawled through the messages in this thread, and decided that an opinion from someone who knows a little less may be of interest. I run an X86 system, with AMD Athlon XP 2400+. I have an old Geforce 2TI graphics card, so I have an additional challenge to manage to handle the legacy cards. I use NVidia, because of their release of drivers into the community. In fact, in three of the four computers in this house, NVidia cards of various vintages have been installed. Because of the legacy issues with the card in this machine, I am considering upgrading to a new card, but as this system is only AGPx8, I would also want to consider upgrading to AMD64 and PCI express.
I am not a Gentoo guru, but have been running this system without a complete rebuild for two years, mostly stable. I have been through the challenges of upgrading GCC, Java, XOrg, and so on, and generally speaking find the guides very helpful. Previous linux installations include Slackware 10 and Suse (6.4, 7.x). None of the rest give me anything like the power to manage my system and maintain integrity as Gentoo does. In fact, every previous installation ended up getting trashed due to library inconsistencies and other problems related to dependency issues. My first installation of linux was in 1996 (kernel ~ 1.36) with an early Slackware distribution - it took several hours just to get X working!!
I think the decision to keep Xorg 7.1 masked is probably the better decision, but I would bow to the result of the discussions between people much more in the know than me. Regardless of the final decision, just post a decent Howto in the documentation on the website, and point to it in the weekly newsletter. The majority of Gentoo users would probably find their way through the upgrade then.

Rgds.,
Paul

pa4wdh · l33t Joined: 16 Dec 2005 Posts: 815

I think most of the discussion has been said, but i'm missing something, which i would like to add:

As far as i know, our current situation is: xorg7.1 breaks binary drivers (or the other way around), and there are two binary drivers, one from ati, one from nvidia.

Great ... so "we" decided to wait for the binary's before 7.1 gets stable. But how does this scale up ?

I mean ... what if this was a good world, and every tiny little video card producer (well, al least a lot) would start making binary only drivers (which is why i said good, and not better :-)

Better would be open source :-)

but you can't force them). Ofcourse good driver support is great, but in that case, if we get into the same situation, it's nearly impossible to wait for *all* the producers to release a new version of their binary driver.
So i think we should think about an other way to handle this. Like someone else already said: Use the VIDEO_CARD setting in make.conf, and if there's an unsafe binary driver, upgrade to the highest version which allows the driver to work.

I don't know if portage is currently able to do such things, but even if it can't, it might be worth the effort if we get faced with more binary only drivers.

VinzC · Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2006 1:14 pm Post subject:

Hmmm... Putting it all together with what we and you said - plus what I imagine - why not, for instance, enhance portage's blocking feature? Say for instance that instead of roughly block an upgrade portage would "search" what is the latest, non-blocking version of a package.

That is to say, in this case, if nVidia blocks Xorg 7.1 then portage should "understand" it must not upgrade Xorg above version 7.0. Yet there has to be another mechanism for working also with pam-login/shadow, for instance, as we all noticed. I must admit I don't like the blocking mechanism very much [there's absolutely no criticism, just sharing my own feeling]. If it were enhanced a little bit so as not to block I would be grateful a thousand times. I would even consider a donation :-)

.

Anyway, Gentoo dev's [and every contributor] deserve our best consideration for this Great distro. Thanks a lot and Go on, Guys.
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nukem996 · l33t Joined: 13 Nov 2003 Posts: 776

I voted no simply because what happens when nvidia releases the 9 series in August/Early Sept(which will have support for Xgl and Xorg 7.1) and ATI users still wont have a driver? If your going to use binary things on an open source platform you should know the risks, and having compatibility issues is one of the risks. Plus masking xorg 7.1 takes about 10sec so I dont see whats so hard about doing that.

shadowknight · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 03 Aug 2002 Posts: 142

I'm not going to restate what I stated above I just wanted to add that in my opinion it's not a matter of being hard to mask something......I feel it's more a matter of if you're running an already stable system then you shouldn't have to mask anything to keep you're system working. when a package gets marked as stable then it should be stable for everybody or at least the majority. I also agree that some updates to how portage checks your system would be a good thing all around. As for the new cards coming out.......well, personally, I still don't understand why people shell out the jacked up prices just to have the latest and greatest, knowing that they're going to be having issues to work out for months anyway. I won't even get started on ATI except to say that, they left an extremely bad taste in my mouth a long time ago. I switched to nvidia and haven't had a problem, complaint, or second thought since. Personally I'm running an amd64 box with 1 gig RAM and an XFX brand geforce 6800XT pcie and soon to be adding another for SLi. I'll stick with stability over the latest and greatest anyday. Again these are just my opinions and what do I know....

Headrush · Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 1:08 am Post subject:

I have thought about this for a while and this is what I think. Whether this is "by the Gentoo rules or not" is debatable but my take in regards to being most helpful to users.

For ages many of us have always told new users to stick to using the stable branch and for the most part you should have no issues. This included using the binary nvidia drivers. Whether this should apply to 3rd party drivers is another issue, but we would no longer be able to say this. In this case maybe these binary drivers should be changed to unstable.

Hopefully ATI/Nvidia can hurry up and get updated drivers and make this a moot point.

nukem996 · l33t Joined: 13 Nov 2003 Posts: 776

Any binary code is unstable, things can change you really dont know what its doing. Personally I think the best compromise here would be for portage to figure out that a user has a binary driver installed such as nvidia or ati and mask xorg 7.1 without informing the user. This way users can use binary drivers without having to do anything and when the binary driver is ready for xorg 7.1 it will let it install.

nukem996 · l33t Joined: 13 Nov 2003 Posts: 776

You I was just thinking Gentoo isnt the only distro facing this problem. Many distros will be upgrading to xorg 7.1 in their next release. Fedora Core 6 is a good example of this. Many have asked nvidia if the updated driver will be ready in time for Fedora Core 6 and all that nvidia has said is they have no release date information. It seems other distros are going foward with open source updates even though there are binary incompatibilities.

On a side note this was taken from nvnews.net

XenoTerraCide · Veteran Joined: 18 Jan 2004 Posts: 1418 Location: MI, USA

xorg 7.1 is only ~arch masked on 2 platforms. If people feel it is necessary to move to 7.1 then they can do so on there own by unmasking it. ~arch to me says that something may be broken or it may not. I don't think anything should be moved to stable unless all of it and it's dependancies are stable. and when compatable drivers are released a few weeks should be given for testing until we make them and 7.1 stable. Those that must have 7.1 or can use 7.1 can unmask it. but those that NEED binary drivers should not be required to mask it.
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nukem996 · l33t Joined: 13 Nov 2003 Posts: 776

Im just trying to say that the trent happens to be to move to xorg 7.1 and if there arent drivers oh well, this is on distro were it is much harder to downgrade. Anyway this brings up another good question which really is the unstable package? Xorg 7.1 seems stable to me, its marked stable on everything but amd64 and x86 because of the driver issues. It seems that the drivers are not stable and thus should be marked testing. BTW im being philosophical

XenoTerraCide · Veteran Joined: 18 Jan 2004 Posts: 1418 Location: MI, USA

as I mentioned a page back... I've had problems with things in 7.1 other than binary drivers. and it still to my knowledge hasn't been fixed. I'm hoping by the time this makes stable they will have fixed evdev. but my bug hasn't been touched by xorg so I'm not so hopeful.
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VinzC · Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 7:52 am Post subject:

massysett · Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 1:41 pm Post subject:

A lot of folks are dumping on the open-source nv driver, but when I tried it recently I was surprised at how well it works. For almost everything I do, including DVD watching, it worked great. It's also much less of a pain to maintain because there's no need to reemerge it after recompiling the kernel.

I think I do only two things that actually use Open GL: Google Earth and xscreensaver. Neither of those is essential to me. I imagine many people are like me and don't really need Open GL all that much.

All that said though, I still use the proprietary nvidia driver. Google Earth is nice and I figure I don't give anything up by using the closed-source driver. But if xorg 7.1 had some great feature or if some great new app needed it, and nvidia didn't work with 7.1, I would switch to nv.
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IntergalacticWalrus · Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 4:25 pm Post subject:

Everyone seems to be missing the real guilty party in this issue: the X.org devs. It is THEM who decided that breaking driver ABI (without even including legacy driver support) was an acceptable decision. Complaints should go to them, not commercial vendors, who are doing their best* at providing Linux support for their hardware.

* well, mostly nVidia

chunderbunny · Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2006 6:27 pm Post subject:

mixmasta · Posted: Wed Jul 19, 2006 1:56 am Post subject:

Well, xorg devs are free to do what they want, but on the other hand ...

why did they decide to break compatibility at 7.1? Shoulda been at 7.0