[ANNOUNCE] Deprecation of xf86-video-nv

[Dave Airlie]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 7:31 PM, Piotr Gluszenia Slawinski
<curious at bwv190.internetdsl.tpnet.pl> wrote:
> 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...

Just to posit, if you are intending on installing the nvidia binary driver
on a niche built by hand system, then I don't think the glibc overheads
would give you much cause. Wierdly you'd have gotten better battery
life most likely using the binary driver since -nv doesn't have any powersaving
abilities. So you are probably shooting yourself in the face to spite your foot
or something.

Dave.