As its name suggests, Nvidia FreeBSD Legacy Display Driver 32-bit is a proprietary OpenGL video driver that provides users with support for old (legacy) Nvidia graphics cards on any computer that runs the FreeBSD operating system or similar BSD variants. This version has been designed to supports only the 32-bit instruction set architecture.
It’s distributed in multiple branches! Which one is right for me?
Nvidia FreeBSD Legacy Display Driver 32-bit is distributed in four different branches, including 304.xx series, 173.14.xx series, 96.43.xx series and 71.86.xx series, each one designed to support a certain number of Nvidia GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). As expected, the driver with the highest version number support more recent legacy video cards than the one with a lower version number.
Installing the Nvidia FreeBSD Legacy Display Driver 32-bit
In order to install the Nvidia FreeBSD Legacy Display Driver on your FreeBSD machine, you will first need to install the kernel headers and download the driver for your Nvidia graphics card (see the section above for details) from the Downloads section above.
Save the tarball file on your Home directory and extract it using the “tar xzf NVIDIA-FreeBSD-x86-xxx.xxx.tar.gz” command, where xxx.xxx is the version number of the driver. Then, you must compile and install the driver using the “cd NVIDIA-FreeBSD-x86-xxx.xxx && make install” command in a console (tty) window.
During the installation, the X configuration file will be automatically optimized for your Nvidia video card, but you can also edit it manually using a command-line text editor. Set the driver as default with the “nvidia-xconfig” command from an X11 terminal emulator.
Bottom line
Even if it provides a settings panel, the Nvidia FreeBSD Display Driver is not an application. It is a hardware driver, which comes with various instructions that tell an operating system how to use a piece of hardware.
What is new in this release:
- Added support for X.Org xserver ABI 24 (xorg-server 1.20).
- Improved nvidia-bug-report.sh to check for kern.log which is the default kernel log-file location for many Debian-based Linux distributions.
- Fixed a bug which could cause X servers that export a Video Driver ABI earlier than 0.8 to crash when running X11 applications which call XRenderAddTraps().
What is new in version 340.106:
- Improved compatibility with recent Linux kernels, including Page Table Isolation (PTI) changes.
What is new in version :
- Added support for X.Org xserver ABI 23 (xorg-server 1.19)
- Added support for FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE.
What is new in version 340.101:
- Added support for X.Org xserver ABI 23 (xorg-server 1.19)
- Fixed a bug that allowed nvidia-installer to attempt loading kernel modules that were built against non-running kernels.
What is new in version 340.96:
- Fixed a bug that could cause texture corruption in some OpenGL applications when video memory is exhausted by a combination of simultaneously running graphical and compute workloads.
- Added support for X.Org xserver ABI 20 (xorg-server 1.18).
What is new in version 340.93:
- Fixed a bug that caused the X server to crash if an OpenGL application tried to allocate a drawable when GPU-accessible memory is exhausted.
- Fixed a bug that could cause an Xid error when terminating a video playback application using the overlay presentation queue in VDPAU.
- Updated nvidia-installer to avoid recursing too deeply into kernel source trees under /usr/lib/modules, mirroring an existing restriction on recursion under /lib/modules.
- Fixed a rare deadlock condition when running applications that use OpenGL in multiple threads on a Quadro GPU.
- Fixed a kernel memory leak that occurred when looping hardware- accelerated video decoding with VDPAU on Maxwell-based GPUs.
- Fixed a bug that caused the X server to crash if a RandR 1.4 output provided by a Sink Output provider was selected as the primary output on X.Org xserver 1.17 and higher.
- Fixed a bug that caused waiting on X Sync Fence objects in OpenGL to hang indefinitely in some cases.
- Fixed a bug that prevented OpenGL from properly recovering from hardware errors or sync object waits that had timed out.
- Updated nvidia-installer to use modprobe(8) when leaving the NVIDIA kernel module loaded after installation, instead of insmod(8) or libkmod. This allows the kernel module to honor any configuration directives that apply to it in /etc/modprobe.d when it is loaded.
- Fixed a bug that allowed console messages from the Linux kernel to be drawn over the user interface of nvidia-installer.
What is new in version 340.76:
- Fixed a bug that caused frequent AMD-Vi page faults on systems with some AMD 8xx/9xx-series chipsets when used with some NVIDIA GPUs.
- Fixed a regression that could cause system crashes when terminating the X server on systems with an NVIDIA Quadro SDI Capture card installed.
- Fixed a bug that caused audio over HDMI to not work on some GPUs while using a display that supports HDMI 3D.
What is new in version 304.123:
- Fixed an interaction problem with xserver 1.15 that occasionally caused OpenGL applications to continue rendering when they are minimized or unmapped.
- Added support for X.org xserver ABI 18 (xorg-server 1.16).
- Fixed a bug that caused corruption or blank screens on monitors that use EDID version 1.3 or older when they are connected via DisplayPort on graphics boards that use external DisplayPort encoders, such as the Quadro FX 4800.
What is new in version 304.121:
- Fixed a bug that prevented the NVIDIA implementation of the Xinerama extension protocol requests from being used when RandR was enabled.
What is new in version 304.119:
- Fixed a crash when using WebGL in Firefox with a Geforce 6 GPU.
What is new in version 304.117:
- Added support for X.Org xserver ABI 15 (xorg-server 1.15).
What is new in version 173.14.38:
- Removed a spurious dependency on libpangox from the nvidia-settings binary shipped as part of the driver package.
- Added support for X.org xserver ABI 14 (xorg-server 1.14).
- Fixed font rendering performance and corruption problems on X servers with backported support for the new glyph cache functionality added to Pixman 0.27.
What is new in version 304.116:
- Updated nvidia-installer to consider the "libglamoregl.so" X loadable extension module to be in conflict with the NVIDIA OpenGL driver. This module can cause the NVIDIA libGL to be loaded into the same process (the X server) as the NVIDIA libglx.so extension module, which is not a supported use case.
- Improved compatibility with recent Linux kernels.
- Updated the NVIDIA OpenGL driver to write temporary files to $TMPDIR if it is set, instead of unconditionally writing to /tmp.
- Updated a fallback of writing temporary files to $HOME/.nvidia to use $HOME/.nv instead, as the latter path is already used for other NVIDIA driver related files.
What is new in version 304.108:
- Implemented workarounds for two Adobe Flash bugs by applying libvdpau commit ca9e637c61e80145f0625a590c91429db67d0a40 to the version of libvdpau shipped with the NVIDIA driver.
- Fixed a bug in nvidia-settings that could cause the wrong resolution to be set in basic mode for setups based on one display per X screen.
- Added /usr/lib/modprobe.d to the list of directories where nvidia-installer may optionally install a generated modprobe configuration file to attempt to disable Nouveau.
What is new in version 173.14.37:
- Removed a spurious dependency on libpangox from the nvidia-settings binary shipped as part of the driver package.
- Added support for X.org xserver ABI 14 (xorg-server 1.14).
- Fixed font rendering performance and corruption problems on X servers with backported support for the new glyph cache functionality added to Pixman 0.27.
What is new in version 304.88:
- Fixed CVE-2013-0131: NVIDIA UNIX GPU Driver ARGB Cursor Buffer Overflow in "NoScanout" Mode. This buffer overflow, which occurred when an X client installed a large ARGB cursor on an X server running in NoScanout mode, could cause a denial of service (e.g., an X server segmentation fault), or could be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution.
What is new in version 304.84:
- Fixed a bug that could lead to rendering corruption after an X server generation (i.e., leaving an X server running after all of its clients have exited).
- Removed a spurious dependency on libpangox from the nvidia-settings binary shipped as part of the driver package.
- Fixed a bug that could cause the X server to crash when performing an RandR 1.0 rotation (e.g., `xrandr --orientation left`) after unplugging the last connected monitor.
- Added support for X.org xserver ABI 14 (xorg-server 1.14).
- Fixed font rendering performance and corruption problems on X servers with backported support for the new glyph cache functionality added to Pixman 0.27.
- Fixed a potential X server crash during initialization, when a graphics card with a TV connector has no TV connected.
- Added a new X configuration option, "UseHotplugEvents", to allow the suppression of RandR events when adding or removing non-DisplayPort displays. See the "X Config Options" appendix of the README for details.
What is new in version 173.14.36:
- Added support for xserver ABI 13 (xorg-server 1.13).
What is new in version 96.43.23:
- Added support for X.Org xserver versions 1.11 and 1.12.
What is new in version 71.86.15:
- Improved compatibility with recent Linux kernels.
What is new in version 304.64:
- Added support for the following GPUs:
- VGX K1
- VGX K2
- Fixed a regression in backlight control functionality on some notebook configurations.
- Fixed a bug that sometimes prevented the display device / X screen selection menu from being displayed in nvidia-settings.
- Fixed a bug that prevented X driver gamma manipulation from working after a VT-switch on some configurations.
- Added the option "--output-file" to nvidia-bug-report.sh to allow specifying a custom filename for the log file.
- Fixed a hang when using OpenGL programs with some SLI Mosaic configurations on pre-Fermi GPUs.
- Added sections to the "Supported NVIDIA GPU Products" list for NVS, Tesla, and VGX products.
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