Who uses SL with free/open source drivers?

I do... but it seems the "norm" that people are using the ATI or NVidia proprietary drivers.

I have a Radeon 9100 -- that's an R200 card, so it's pretty old nowadays. I'm running on a 3.2GHz PIV system, so the CPU is relatively recent. (I tried a Radeon 9250 for a while, but the machine locks up when I start X with DRI enabled, so I dropped back to the 9100.)

In a quiet area with few other residents in the Sim, not a lot of textures, etc., I can typically get 10-15 fps. When I'm tooling around the mainland, even in sparsely populated areas, I usually get <5 fps. The other day at the SL LUG meeting, it was usually <1 fps....

I'm using Debian Testing, and the kernel and x.org driver files that come by default from there. Has anybody used free drivers with higher end cards than the one I've got? What kind of performance do you get out of SL? What are the best cards supported by free drivers right now?

-Rob

I use Nvidia's driver - as much work is going into the OSS nv driver, the Nvidia driver performs better.

I hear ATi is a bear, free drivers or no - I have had nothing but good luck with this nv card (GeForce 6800) and Nvidia's drivers. I would recommend that combo to anyone wanting to run 3D intensive apps on *nix.

Just my $0.02.

Chris

The open source r300 driver can sort of play Doom 3, (Missing textures, its slow...) but SL immediately locks up with a black screen on startup. In fact, it locks up the whole X server, hard. However if I ssh in from another machine and kill secondlife, it recovers. I'm not quite sure who to submit a bug to about this for best effect.

ATI's been doing a pretty good job of kicking NVIDIA's ass in raw hardware capability, at least towards the low end, but fglrx is indeed crappy. And I'm guessing it'll take a good year or two from now for the open source r300 drivers to get stablized and performance optimized enough to be a realistic alternative.

NVIDIA's really the way to go for now.

DRI is depreciated, you don't need it/it can be replaced with newer modules.

Load "i2c" #card detection(TV tuner)
Load "bitmap" #bitmap fonts
Load "ddc" #Vesa Display Data Channel
Load "extmod" #server extensions
Load "freetype" #free type font
Load "glx" #accelerated gl
Load "int10" #graphics card init.
Load "type1"#Type 1 fonts
Load "vbe" #VESA bios extensions
Load "v4l" #video 4 linux

DRI won't be used by secondlife if glx is present. The above are what I use, many will cause problems on ATI hardware but it provides some ideas on what to unload and try loading to fix the problem.

Why not use the official closed source ones? The free ones will be insanely slow even with a higher end card.
I have myself a 7800GT nvidia card and actually get better framerate running second life under linux than under windows when using the official nvidia drivers.

The proprietary Radion drivers (as of 8.28.08 - which is the most recent one that is considered usably stable by Debian and the most recent one I have had any luck getting to actually work) still rely on DRI. But then this *IS* ATI :-/

"There is no wrath in Heaven or on Earth like an Linux user stuck using a post r200 ATI card for 3D."

'Cause there are free ones.

It's part of why I use Linux in the first place

Besides, overall it's lower hassle to stick with the free drivers. They get updated if core stuff (e.g. the Kernel) gets updated. It's especially convenient if the drivers are already in the kernel.

I'm a stickler for using free drivers whenever possible. The fact that it's so difficult to find 3d video cards or wireless cards with free drivers right now is a huge problem.

<i>The free ones will be insanely slow even with a higher end card.</i>

Have you TRIED them? Or do you repeat this simply because it's the common wisdom that everybody repeats?

On my Radeon 9200 -- which is hardly a recent card nowadays -- I do fairly well. I get 15fps in a lot of areas. With "local lights" turned on, sometimes I have issues, but otherwise it's usually perfectly fine. This hardly counts as insanely slow....

-Rob

I don't think there _are_ any free drivers for nvidia cards that do accelerated graphics (apart from the nouveau project, which has not released any working drivers yet). Correct me if I am wrong.

I cannot say much about the free ati drivers, as it has been a while since i tried those. I however say that the open source nvidia ones are totally unusable when it comes to 3d acceleration. And like you said, i have heard people saying that the ati ones are still really slow with 3d as well. I still dont understand what is the problem with using closed source drivers with a open source system, considering that they seem to work much better when it comes to 3d acceleration. Though i would personally use the open source ones as well if i did not need the 3d acceleration for games or similar.

I'm not sure if there even are open source nVidia drivers.

Through about R200 or thereabouts, ATI was actually providing programming information to the free software developers. That was the reason I've always bought ATI -- they were more supported of the free software community. However, they stopped doing that a few years ago, which is why cards newer than a Radeon 9250 or thereabouts only have reverse-engineered 3d acceleration.

Nvidia didn't have 3d acceleration at all last I checked, and as such I've never considered getting one of those cards. (That is, NVidia has never had open source acceleration.)

Some may scoff at my attitude saying "don't be a philosophical sticker, use what works." However, I am a philosophical stickler. The problem with using closed source drivers with an open source system is that your system is no longer open source. If you settle for the closed-source drivers, and buy the hardware knowing you have those drivers, it dilutes the incentive for hardware manufacturers to play fair with free software developers. The fact is that there are people who will develop Linux drivers for their cards for no cost if they only have the programming information they need. Instead, the Linux developers have to do it in spite of having no information from the developers.

Also, I'm taking the long view. The complaints people make about the unstable proprietary ATI drivers show that proprietary drivers are hardly a panacea. And, you are at the mercy of the company to both keep releasing drivers, and keep them updated if the Linux kernel module interface changes, or if x.org changes (both of which do). With free drivers, they can be updated as other things are updated, so it's a more secure long-term solution. We're already at the mercy of too many other places to make it a good idea to be at the mercy of hardware manufacturers to keep supplying updated drivers for a card we own.

Long term, if we want to see good hardware support for free operating systems like Linux, we need to try to pay attention to what free drivers are available, and to what companies are more agreeable to free software developers. In the short term, that may mean poorer 3d performance as the latest cards aren't supported, but eventually the free drivers are likely to be better. I'm pretty sure for Radeon 9250-era and earlier cards, the free drivers are better than the ATI supplied ones, for instance.

For laptops, get a card with Intel chips. No, not as utterly latest and fast as the high-end ATI or NVidia cards, but Intel does support open-source drivers.

For desktops... it's a mess right now, becuase neither high-end company is playing fair. Once upon a time, ATI was the place to go, since they gave the information free software developers needed. The best we can do is take the cards that are supported at all by free drivers.

If you care about free software, that is, instead of just what works right now.

-Rob

And by the way, speaking from expeirence---

"Insanely slow" is very much not an accurate description of SL running on a 3.2GHz PIV with a Radeon 9250 Pro (or even a Radeon 9100) with 128MB of graphics memory and the open-source 3d drivers.

I speak from experience, not from repeating common "wisdom."

-Rob

When I had my Kubuntu machine running, I used open source drivers for my ATI card.

Even on this XP machine I use the Omega drivers for my NVIDIA card. There was a significant perf difference (30-50fps now) for me when I switched to Omega drivers, and a friend of mine had a much greater difference : SL is now actually playable at interactive framerates (around 20fps) for him now, whereas before he was getting 5fps on a machine that runs Oblivion at 50+fps easy.

Can everyone get clear on the difference between r200 and r300? They are *vastly* differing generations of hardware, with completely different drivers.

r200 has very stable and mature open source drivers, written using honest-to-god specs direct from ATI. In fact, recent versions of fglrx (and apparently the windows drivers as well...) have completely dropped r200 support. So open source is really the only sane choice.

r300 has very new drivers, written via reverse engineering. So far they are mostly unusable for newer games. My 9800SE doesn't even work with them at all yet. Closed source fglrx is really your only currently usable choice for SL.

Radeon 9250 and below is an r200/r100. 9500 and up is an r300. (x1300 and up is an r500, another completely different generation of hardware. They even changed the 2d part this time...)

r200 = use open source drivers
r300 = use fglrx
r500 = use fglrx

Now can we stop arguing about this? Can this go in a FAQ?

Maybe I'll try the open source Nouveau driver once they claim that it's usable (see http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/ ) but for now I'm sticking to the closed-source NVidia driver, it's cool enough to be able to do such 3D graphics on Linux

<i>In fact, recent versions of fglrx (and apparently the windows drivers as well...) have completely dropped r200 support. So open source is really the only sane choice.</i>

Heh. There's an extremely elegant argument right there as to why it's necessary that we have open source drivers developed....

Proprietary drivers can always just drop support in later versions. Which sucks if you want to install a new version of the kernel.

Open source drivers... well, if one programmer drops support, another can pick it up. And if it's in the standard kernel and X trees, it's likely to be convected along.

I'll be trying the r300 drivers shortly; I've got such a card on order. I'll find out first hand if the drivers really are in a state that makes SL not work.

Like how nvidia dropped support for anything older than a GeForce 2 in their closed source drivers leaving everyone with TNT2s completely dead in the water? Though a TNT2 is pretty damned old at this point. Ah, I remember when I put down $200 to get a top-of-the-line 32mb TNT2 Ultra AGP back in 1999... (still have it, sitting on the shelf...)

And, just a few days after I posted that ^^^^^, I updated my systems only to be greeted with:

(WW) NVIDIA(0): The NVIDIA GeForce2 MX/MX 400 GPU installed in this system is
(WW) NVIDIA(0): supported through the NVIDIA 1.0-96xx Legacy drivers.
(WW) NVIDIA(0): Please visit http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html for
(WW) NVIDIA(0): more information. The 1.0-9746 NVIDIA driver will ignore
(WW) NVIDIA(0): this GPU. Continuing probe...
(EE) No devices detected.

And:

(WW) NVIDIA(0): The NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 420 GPU installed in this system is
(WW) NVIDIA(0): supported through the NVIDIA 1.0-96xx Legacy drivers.
(WW) NVIDIA(0): Please visit http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html for
(WW) NVIDIA(0): more information. The 1.0-9746 NVIDIA driver will ignore
(WW) NVIDIA(0): this GPU. Continuing probe...
(EE) No devices detected.

...In my Xorg.0.log. So... it seems every single nvidia card I own has been EOLed. Wonderful.

rpm -e xorg-x11-drv-nvidia
yum install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-96xx

*sigh* Unfortunately I can't really afford to get anything better, prices on AGP cards are rather inflated as there's still a lot of demand, but manufacturers are moving on, and replacing my motherboard to get PCIe would cost even more...

I guess I could fish for another Radeon 9800SE on ebay...

I am running the open source radeon driver on both my laptop and desktop. The laptop has a ati mobility radeon 7500, and is usable but laggy (it also has only 256MB ram and a 1.5 ghz processor). The desktop has an ati radeon x600, which is also called an rv380 some places, i'm not sure why (with 1GB ram and a dual 3ghz processor). The desktop runs second life just fine.

I have a Radeon X800 on a PCI Express bus.

I'm using the free drivers.

It all works.

Re: NVIDIA EOLing your cards, welcome to the wonderful world of depending on proprietary drivers. That's why "fanatics" like me get all grouchy when people suggest not only that the proprietary drivers are an adequate solution, but that there's something wrong with me for thinking that we should be trying to support the the free drivers....

More details:

It's probably not as fast as it could be. I'm getting about the same frame rates I was getting with my Radeon 9250 (a R200 card) on an AGP 8x bus. (Also the CPU is different, Pentium D 3.4GHz now vs. Pentium 4 3.2 GHz then.) Hopefully, with time, frame rates will get better. I'm using the latest First Look client (1.13.3.57679); I get 10-30fps, less in a very crowded area (Ahern Welcome Area), with something like 15-20 fps more typical.

I run Debian testing, so the X.org and video drivers are pretty recent. It's a 7.1 release of x.org, and the ati video driver package from Debian is version 6.6.3-2.

If you want to have a video card that will reliably work without having to depend on some closed-source, hope-for-the-best proprietary client, a Radeon 9200 or thereabouts (R200) card may still be your best bet, but my experience suggests that some newer Radeon cards also work.

I do wish that ATI were as nice as they used to be about supporting the open source drivers. Not only would that mean that I would feel better about buying their products, it would probably also mean that the free driver writers would have the information they need to write better drivers. But, an imperfect solution is better than a proprietary one....

-Rob

All true, but incomplete.

Your system boots using a proprietary, closed-source BIOS, right?

Your hard-drive uses a proprietary, closed-source BIOS, too.

Your CPU (built fromproprietary, closed-source designs) requires proprietary, closed-source microcode patches to even run.

The firmware on ATI cards is still proprietary, closed-source code regardless of whether the OS driver is OSS.

The firmware on most every NIC card is still proprietary, closed-source code too... also regardless of whether the OS driver is OSS.

While we're cleaning house, practically every modem (dialup, dsl, or cable) over 300bps contains closed code.

So, with all of that, it seems hypocritical to me for the FOSS community single out one driver from one manufacturer.

To me, it seems a bit like vegans ignoring all of the field animals slaughtered while harvesting their food.

To be truly open, someone would have to switch to an OpenSPARC CPU, run a Linux open BIOS, replace the hard drives with a memory stick of some sort that has no BIOS or other onboard software manager, go back to using a dumbterm or serial output console since there are no 2D or 3D open video card BIOS, and return to SLIP/PPP serial networking.

Apologies to the forum for the rant... but I have been the target of this same spurious logic disguised as FOSS zealotry before and thought I should remind everyone of a few important points that always seem to get overlooked in the headlong rush to condemn people who "aren't open-source enough"

P.S. I would happily be first in line to buy a pure Java or FOSS computer, if such a thing existed. Until then, I will use the mix of open and closed that minimizes the closed where possible but still lets me do what I need or want to.

How are you getting those frame rates on the OpenJPEG texture decoder?!?

Dude, I do the best I can.

There ARE video cards with free drivers.

A good 3/4 of what you say are straw men, anyway.

Besides, I'm not condemning those who "aren't open source enough." I'm condemning those who condemn me for thinking that there's a good reason to want to have free video card drivers.

So go away already.

-Rob

Allen -- I'm still using the official LL client, not one I compiled myself. (So, yeah, go and flame me for being inconsistent because I'm not pure. Anybody who wants to flame me about that, I have a special finger on my hand just for you.)

-Rob

both the normal linux client and the most recent linux client work just fine on IBM ThinkPad X60 and X60s with this GL blacklist:

export LL_GL_BLACKLIST=ijkl

proprietary ATI vl5200 drivers on a T60p would lock up whenever a HUD was attached.