@FreeBSDFoundation@mastodon.social
I've started investigating
#FreeBSD at (maybe) since 2.1.6 in conjunction with several other OS'es including
#BeOS,
#WinNT4,
#超漢字(kinda proprietary package of
#BTRON with huge font set) with several
#Linux distros (Yggdrasil, Vine and Turbo as far as I can recall now). At the era, my personal daily driver was
#OS/2.
After IBM discontinued OS/2 and the successor, eComStation, didn't actually released Japanese edition (ordered one and obtained English version for temporary use until it's ready, but never happened), I needed to decide which OS to make my NeXT^H^H^H^Hnext daily driver, and switched to FreeBSD, which seemed to be most familiar with me.
I've used several GPUs for XFree86 (and Xorg after it landed) on FreeBSD.
At first, VGA/SVGA driver was too slow, so I purchased a license of AcceleratedX to use S3 GPUs (and then, Power9000, Matrox MGA,...) and some ATIs(!).
When I've switched my daily driver hardware to notebooks, driver for new GPUs were mostly unavailable after AcceleratedX has gone.
But fortunately, found that NVIDIA is providing FreeBSD version of drivers for their cutting edge GPUs and ports were already available. After that, I choose PCs having NVIDIA GPUs everytime I need to purchase one.
I was happy for a while, but introduction of iGPUs caused headaches. There were too many screams that graphics/drm-*-kmod at their early phase was quite unstable and often broken. So I've always been looking for notebooks that can disable iGPU via BIOS / UEFI, but it became harder and harder.
Now I'm using Minisforum MS-01 that allows installing half size, half height PCIeX16 card which doesn't require additional power supply with RTX A400.
And noticed that I'm now one of the maintainers for
#NVIDIA driver
#ports on FreeBSD.
Today, latest Production Branch of NVIDIA GPU drivers 595.84 landed onto ports tree at commit ec6b356f6328.
https://cgit.freebsd.org/ports/commit/?id=ec6b356f63289da87c9fbb52cdf558805383caf6
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