# nVidia Graphics on CURRENT



## UFeindschiff (Jul 16, 2015)

Hi, before you tell me, yes I know that 11-CURRENT is unstable ATM and not intended for everyday use, but sadly FreeBSD 10.1 doesn't support my Ethernet card, so I just have to use this unstable version if I want to try out FreeBSD. I'm using Gentoo as my primary OS and therefore have at least experience there, even though I already noticed that FreeBSD is quite different in many cases.

Anyway, as I am having an Nvidia Graphics card installed and want to start an X server that's not running in either VESA mode or using the shitty nv driver, I was trying to get the proprietary Nvidia driver set up, which of course failed as I was instantly told that FreeBSD 11 isn't supported by the driver I downloaded. So I know from Linux that the binary driver there only supports certain kernel versions, but that's mostly due to the fact that the Linux kernel likes changing a bit on their driver interface and so the old driver really isn't compatible any more. I've heard that this is not true for FreeBSD and that the driver interface there stayed pretty much the same over the years and so I'm wondering whether or not there's a way to make the FreeBSD10 Nvidia driver also work on FreeBSD 11. That being said I don't know much about the FreeBSD kernel itself neither do I know about how big the changes between different versions usually are, so I may seem like a huge idiot to all of you at the moment


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## protocelt (Jul 16, 2015)

x11/nvidia-driver works well with FreeBSD 11-CURRENT. That said, maybe your NIC is supported in 10-STABLE which would give you a more stable environment. What is the model of the ethernet card that doesn't work in FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE?


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## tobik@ (Jul 16, 2015)

protocelt said:


> x11/nvidia-driver works well with FreeBSD 11-CURRENT.


It does, but I had to disable WITNESS (set the sysctl debug.witness.watch=0) or my system would lock up eventually.



UFeindschiff said:


> there's a way to make the FreeBSD10 nVidia driver also work on FreeBSD11


Make sure that you reinstall x11/nvidia-driver from ports (the kernel module needs to be recompiled) if you switch from FreeBSD 10 to FreeBSD 11.


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## protocelt (Jul 16, 2015)

Ah, I'm running a kernel without debugging enabled so didn't run into that. Thanks


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## UFeindschiff (Jul 16, 2015)

My NIC is the following
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Qualcomm Atheros Killer E220x Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 10)

I did a clean install from the FreeBSD11-CURRENT images, so I didn't do a switch from 10.1. I will have a look at it. When I was looking in x11/xorg-drivers (or something like that) I couldn't find it. Thanks for the help here. Will tell you how it worked out.


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## protocelt (Jul 16, 2015)

UFeindschiff said:


> My NIC is the following
> 03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Qualcomm Atheros Killer E220x Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 10)


This NIC _should_ be supported in 10-STABLE as of r273366.


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## UFeindschiff (Jul 16, 2015)

When I booted the FreeBSD 10.1install image and went into the live system there I only had the loopback device there


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## protocelt (Jul 16, 2015)

Right. 10.1-RELEASE doesn't support the NIC. You'd have to use a 10-STABLE snapshot which right now is called 10.2-PRERELEASE due to 10.2-RELEASE being close to release and can be found here.


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## UFeindschiff (Jul 16, 2015)

Ah, okay. Don't know that much about the FreeBSD naming scheme and when coming from Linux it's a bit confusing (where stable usually means it's well-tested software and usually one of the older branches).

Anyway, I successfully installed the NVIDIA driver now, but it looks like I can't get the X Server to work with my config (no screens found). I used `nvidia-xconfig` to generate my xorg.conf (as `Xorg -configure` would produced some garbage that doesn't match my setup at all). Are there any common issues with that as posting my xorg.conf would require me to access UFS from Linux which would likely require me to rebuild my Kernel and I currently can't find the UFS support in my Linux kernel config.


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## protocelt (Jul 16, 2015)

Well, assuming you have no other issues, following tobik's "Nvidia How To" in Thread 52311 would be enough to configure the Nvidia card for your machine.


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## junovitch@ (Jul 17, 2015)

protocelt said:


> Right. 10.1-RELEASE doesn't support the NIC. You'd have to use a 10-STABLE snapshot which right now is called 10.2-PRERELEASE due to 10.2-RELEASE being close to release and can be found here.



FYI, we are actually at 10.2-BETA1 right now and those are available from here:
http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/ISO-IMAGES/10.2/

Per the release schedule 10.2-BETA2 is right around the corner:
https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/10.2R/schedule.html


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## junovitch@ (Jul 17, 2015)

UFeindschiff said:


> ah, okay. Don't know that much about the FreeBSD naming scheme and when coming from Linux it's a bit confusing (where stable usually means it's well-tested software and usually one of the older branches).
> ...



Regarding this you'll want to give the FreeBSD Handbook a read for a more in depth explanation of CURRENT/STABLE.  The FreeBSD FAQ also has some more detail.
https://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/current-stable.html
https://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en/books/faq/introduction.html#idp55482576


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## kpa (Jul 17, 2015)

UFeindschiff said:


> Ah, okay. Don't know that much about the FreeBSD naming scheme and when coming from Linux it's a bit confusing (where stable usually means it's well-tested software and usually one of the older branches).



The word "stable" doesn't refer to operational stability in the usual sense but to "stable ABI". What stable ABI means is that the user-facing programming interfaces in the kernel and the userland shared libraries in the base system are guaranteed to stay compatible trough the lifetime of the same major version line of FreeBSD. For example a program compiled on FreeBSD 9.0 is guaranteed to continue to work on every minor release of FreeBSD 9 if one assumes that the program is using shared libraries only from the base system (ports are more complicated matter, they don't have the same stability guarantees). Stable versions are also where the work for next minor release of a major version line is conducted, for example the last release in FreeBSD 10 is now 10.1 and the stable version 10-STABLE is at the moment called "10.2-BETA1" because it will be the basis for the upcoming release 10.2.

HTH


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