[Gllug] TFT Monitors

[Mike Brodbelt]

Nix wrote:
> On 1 Jan 2007, Peter Cannon outgrape:
>> On Sunday 31 December 2006 12:53, Tethys wrote:
>>> [1]. They tend to be well supported 
>>> under Linux without the need for closed source drivers that leave you
>>> with a tainted (and hence unsupportable) kernel, they're more than fast
>>> enough, and they've proved less prone to failure than a PCI/AGP/PCIE card
>>> in my experience. Plus of course, you don't need to pay extra for them.
>>> YMMV.
>> When I first got into Linux I used to lay awake at night fretting 
>> over "xxxx.i386.rpm tainting kernel setting somethingorother flag" then it 
>> came to pass that that error message is unimportant unless your a purist as 
>> it has no effect what so ever on the kernel performance. :-)
> 
> Please tell me this is a troll, unless you consider `renders your kernel
> impossible to support; renders bugs impossible to fix; renders upgrades
> impossible shortly after the binary module vendor decides to stop working
> on the module' to be `no effect what so ever'.

I typically consider the taint flag to usually mean "you have a piece of
hardware which you need to throw away and replace with something
decent". I'm careful these days when speccing Linux systems to emphasize
that all hardware must be supported with open drivers. However, non
hardware related things have recently started to be more intrusive -
stuff like VMware, the Cisco VPN client(*). That's an annoying tendency,
and one that needs killing off, IMHO.

> A lot of binary modules are also immense monstrous lumps outmassing all
> the rest of the kernel put together: this has detrimental effects on
> icache hit rates and thus, er, slows the kernel down.

A lot of in general, or nVidia in particular :-)

Mike

* There's a GPL replacement for this called vpnc, which seems to do the job.
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