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Comment by hs86 | Hacker News Reader

It has been updated frequently in the past: https://www.freshports.org/x11/nvidia-driver

(scroll down for commit history)

edit: Has Nvidia been building a FreeBSD driver for the past 20 years, or did they initially port a *nix driver from a different OS to FreeBSD?

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Also Solaris:

* https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/

> edit: Has Nvidia been building a FreeBSD driver for the past 20 years, or did they initially port a nix driver from a different OS to FreeBSD?*

When the game came out, I was playing the Linux-binary of RtCW under FreeBSD using an Nvidia card:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Castle_Wolfenstein

nVidia uses a common core for all their drivers so FreeBSD code is essentially wrapping that.

This is is where the Linux griping actually come from - they don't rewrite their driver when kernel decides to rethink their graphics stack.

They're even moving most of the kernel-space driver code to the chip on-board the GPU now (see GSP) and having the kernel driver talk to that.

Pretty soon NUCs and RPis with external GPUs will be common.

I look forward to never fitting those fiddly power LED/switch wires ever again.

Tons of nostalgia for having been there, done that but that’s all it is; fiddling with nostalgia. It’s a hardware dark pattern.

Nvidia has a whole section on installing on FreeBSD [1] as well as supporting drivers and have done so for quite a number of years. However, it's best to just install from package.

[1] https://download.nvidia.com/freebsd/1.0-9629/README/index.ht...

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