NVidia 173.x driver and FreeBSD 8

[pizzamig]

Hi,

I have a system with a NVidia FX 5800, a graphic board that needs of the legacy nvidia-driver 173.x version.

I need to migrate to FreeBSD 8. I installed the driver using the port and everything was fine, but...
I noticed that with FreeBSD 8 graphic performance is poor and I start to investigate why.
I downloaded the last driver version (173.14.31) from the NVidia's ftp server and I recompile it without lucky.
I discovered that NVIDIA doesn't support *officially* FreeBSD8 with this version and ports Makefile remove the check about FreeBSD version from nv-freebsd.h

My question is: why NVidia doesn't support FreeBSD8 if it successfully compiles? Maybe because the driver has poor performance and they don't want to maintain/fix it?

Thank in advance for your help!

[uOpt]

I can't parse that.

Are you saying it works and performs well after you compile it without version check?

[pizzamig]

Hi
I'm saying: it works, but performance are poor.

I removed the check, because I see that on the official FreeBSD port tree.

and the question is: Nvidia 173.x driver has a performance problem on FreeBSD 8?

[zander]

The 173.xx FreeBSD graphics driver series hasn't been updated to take advantage of features available in the FreeBSD 8 kernel, and still employs a variety of workarounds originally designed to address limitations in older kernels. Due mainly to this, the driver isn't guaranteed to work (it may simply hang, for example), and it may suffer from performance problems in some situations.

That said, we do still plan on updating the legacy drivers to work with current versions of FreeBSD. However, this work is gated by backports of key infrastructure and unfortunately prioritized behind other work. As a result, it has been progressing very slowly.

[pizzamig]

The main problem is that board is AGP based...

I'm trying to use different version of 173.x driver family, but without luck.
Performance change, but not enough