Darn, it's late at night and I still haven't caught up on all of the discussion about the nvidia(etc) drivers, but.
We only use linux on our machines and do play WoW with them because windows is such a pain to keep around just to play an on line game. I don't like to dual boot a computer and shut down a good linux session just because we like to play World of Warcraft. So we use wine and the closed source nvidia drivers to get the opengl speed that we need to play the game while listening to music(even a softsynth) with jack at low latencies*.
Recently we needed to install Fedora 4 on a athlon 64 dual core and now we're starting to see the problems as the linux preemption clashes with the nvidia drivers. Not a pretty sight.
We managed to get some stability with the 2.6.11 kernels but it all goes to hell with the 2.6.14. After a lot of reconfiguring, trying different kernels, and a lot of wasted time; we found what will work at least.
We started to dig around for what others were doing with this situation and came accross this site:
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=14
where there seems to be a healthy amount of finger pointing from the linux side and the nvidia side about things working or not.
It really looks like no one is right or wrong on this, and at least both sides are trying to get things to work. I feel that just like the low latency audio issues where we needed to be more vocal to get decent audio into the linux kernel; we prolly need to make more noise to the kernel folks to be sure things are clean, and to the nvidia people that they need to accept that it's a new world where preemption is the norm.
Tracey.
*We use our machines for high end audio and development first, but it's funny how a well tuned linux box can outpreform a windows box in that game.
Received on Thu Dec 15 16:15:06 2005
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