Nouveau NVIDIA Driver To Enter Linux 2.6.33 Kernel 289
An anonymous reader writes "Not only is DRBD to be included in the Linux 2.6.33 kernel, but so is the Nouveau driver. The Nouveau driver is the free software driver that was created by clean-room reverse engineering NVIDIA's binary Linux driver. It has been in development for several years with 2D, 3D, and video support. The DRM component is set to enter the Linux 2.6.33 kernel as a staging driver. This is coming as a surprise move after yesterday Linus began ranting over Red Hat not upstreaming Nouveau and then Red Hat attributing this delay to microcode issues. The microcode issue is temporarily worked around by removing it from the driver itself and using the kernel's firmware loader to insert this potentially copyrighted work instead."
How does it compare with the other NVidia drivers? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a Linux user using the official binary NVidia drivers, they work good - very good even, many modern Windows games work in Wine without any performance loss.
How do the Nouveau Nvidia drivers compare to the official ones? Do they have the same performance, no little annoying bugs or differences, etc...?
Re:How does it compare with the other NVidia drive (Score:2, Informative)
How do the Nouveau Nvidia drivers compare to the official ones?
Slower on every machine I've tested.
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Re:How does it compare with the other NVidia drive (Score:5, Informative)
The official closed source driver creates a proprietary dependency on an otherwise open OS kernel.
This irks some free software hippies and it also makes using Nvidia hardware on unsupported hardware platforms more difficult.
Re:How does it compare with the other NVidia drive (Score:5, Insightful)
It also causes my Inspiron 8200 to crash hard when I try to use ACPI functions. Nvidia has expressed no interest in fixing this bug and that pushes it from "mildly unacceptable to free software hippies and people with obscure unsupported hardware" to "completely useless crap masquerading as software".
I'm not bitter about it but it's a good example of a problem which could easily be fixed in open source software, but can't even be touched in something as closed as the nvidia video driver.
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I'm willing to bet it's much easier for you to fix Nouveau's implementation than to get access to Nvidia's code and fix the bug in the proprietary driver.
Which is really the point of not completely relying on proprietary code in the kernel.
Re:How does it compare with the other NVidia drive (Score:5, Insightful)
Here is a lovely pastry. It was made with the finest butter, the flour was hand ground by monks, and it is served with cream and tiny bits of shaved chocolate.
Oh, and it is also covered with sprinkles of bacillus anthracis which will cause you to die in agony after you eat it. But just look at all the other wonderful features it has!
Don't you want to eat it? Sure the antrax does pose a teeny tiny little problem, but maybe you could just eat a little bit of it.
(Or do we need a car analogy to explain the problem here?)
Re:How does it compare with the other NVidia drive (Score:4, Informative)
It also irks people who noticed that a huge amount of devices didn't get 64 bit Windows drivers, because it was a lot more profitable to get people to buy new scanners, printers and webcams. Precisely thanks to this I now have a perfectly good color laser printer and scanner that my brother can't use anymore.
Experience shows that if you trust the manufacturer will release updated drivers when they become needed, you're going to get screwed sooner or later. His new scanner (also made by Canon, guess he doesn't learn) looks nearly identical, and has pretty much the same specs. The only difference is that the light has been replaced with LEDs, but really he didn't gain anything from the new model.
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nVidia can arbitrarily stop supporting old graphics cards at any time. ATI did this with my R600-based laptop chipset; the newest ATI Catalyst linux drivers now longer support my two-year-old laptop. Since linux has a smaller user base, it's a "safe" place to cut costs by not having to feature-test against older hardware with every proprietary driver release. Having an open source driver would prevent you from suddenly becoming unable to use your hardware on newer linux releases.
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Re:How does it compare with the other NVidia drive (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How does it compare with the other NVidia drive (Score:5, Interesting)
I've heard some absolutely nightmarish stories about getting ATI cards to work properly in Linux and they haven't gotten much better. In the most recent releases, they may have even gotten worse.
They might be more Linux-friendly now than they were in the past, but that doesn't make them good. They're certainly nowhere near as Linux-friendly as Nvidia.
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Re:How does it compare with the other NVidia drive (Score:5, Insightful)
I have had more luck now that the Open Source ATI driver added 3D accel support for my card. The official ATI drivers suck badly with barley working 32 bit drivers and mostly useless 64 bit support. The open source drivers actually make me like using my Dell Vostro again and it's actually to a point where I would rather use ATI than NVIDIA.
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None ship them enabled because nvidia doesn't let them by default.* I think at least one distro has distributed them (Mandrake) possibly in one of their pay products. Most have an option to download them after install. (Kubuntu, Gentoo being the last two I checked, though you could argue that's still in the install for gentoo.)
Frankly, I think you'll be disappointed in the support ATI on Linux has.
*I just looked, and they now allow it, provided nothing is modified. They didn't last time I looked.
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I'll agree with you, they work good, when they work. The problem with the official drivers is that they're a binary blob, thus most distributions (none I've ever seen) ship with them enabled. This is an issue if the default nv driver crashes your machine. Because of this, I'm going with ATI next time, I've heard they're way more Linux friendly now.
For what it's worth: I decided to go the ATI route this time around. I mostly use it for running Blender. I've been pretty happy with it overall - but I wouldn't say I've found the drivers to be particularly more or less troublesome than the NVidia ones.
They're not (Score:2)
Believe me, I've had nothing but headaches with my Radeon 3650 mobility, and being a laptop, I'll have to live with it.
But for the foreseeable future, any ATI chip in a laptop is a dealbreaker
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Open source stuff works OK, but not as good for hi-def video.
Is the hi-def video open content?
Re:How does it compare with the other NVidia drive (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you think any end user cares? The nvidia binary driver provides hardware accelerated playback of all high-def formats. The open source one doesn't. That's all that matters.
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Doesn't matter. The problem is that, with many combinations of card and driver, there's no accelerated video support, and that video tears like a sonofabitch even in non-HD forms.
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I agree with most of this, but "But they only got compositing some weeks ago." is flat out false.
I remember playing with Beryl on my ATI card using fglrx back in 2007. Makes me question some of your other more specific claims. (I can't speak for much currently, I've been happily using the free radeon driver)
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As I understand it (I have an ATI card, not an Nvidia), Nouveau currently has 2d hardware support, and 3d support is in progress. Don't expect it to replace the proprietary driver for anything requiring preformance anytime soon, but this is good news for people who dislike the proprietary drivers, and for distros that cannot/willnot ship with them by default.
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Gallium3d is the planned future of graphics drivers in linux. OpenCL is what is going to be used for general purpose computing on GPUs.
This area really isn't my forte, but you can find a bit more information at: http://zrusin.blogspot.com/2009/02/opencl.html [blogspot.com]
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Uhh..... No shit?
2d acceleration refers to things like textured video, for playing movies or whatnot. 3d acceleration refers to things like the rendering of 3d primitives on screen, stuff like Quake. Different sorts of math are used for each.
I certainly hope you are trolling because if not, this is a new level of ignorance that I was not aware existed.
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I've heard lots of horror stories about the ATI/AMD graphics drivers for Linux (and there are plenty of them in responses to your post), but I'll contribute that I just got a laptop with a FireGL M7740, got "fglrx" out of apt, and everything worked immediately and with good performance. It's a big binary blob, but once you've resigned yourself to that, I don't find it to be any less performant or reliable than the big nVidia binary blob.
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How do the Nouveau Nvidia drivers compare to the official ones? Do they actually work, no glitching/freezing issues or other similarities to the official driver, etc...?
Debugging advantage of a Free driver (Score:4, Informative)
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Well to person who wants the driver to plays games and is not willing to or able to trace an issue and contribute a fix -- what the difference?
With any luck, in time it will become more stable and more reliable - you won't upgrade your Linux distribution to the latest and greatest only to find that your 3d graphics has magically stopped working. Not because you traced issues, but because other people did.
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I haven't traced or debugged code in a few years, not since my last C++ class.
I've never contributed a fix to OSS.
That wouldn't in this case stop me from sending a copy of the crash debug report to the developer. Maybe opening a bug report, which is dead easy.
Before open source drivers I would have no choice but to use binary blobsk, and wouldn't even be able to send in the crash reports.
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Well to person who wants the driver to plays games and is not willing to or able to trace an issue and contribute a fix -- what the difference?
If the driver is Free, the user can pay someone else who is a kernel or X developer to fix it. That's the point of buying Linux support from a company like Canonical. But with a non-free driver, NVIDIA and ATI can just say "sucks to be you; we'd be glad for you to take your business elsewhere."
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The difference is not much on Windows. ATI and Nvidia care enough to trace issues and fix them on Windows. They don't care enough to do it on Linux. They don't care enough to implement many X features in standard ways either.
The difference is that with a Libre driver when there's an annoying bug it will get fixed. With the gratis Linux drivers there are plenty of annoying bugs that will probably never get fixed. In another post on this story I mentioned ATI's fast-user-switching bug. It causes X to go down
Never A Crash (Score:2)
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Devil's advocate (Score:2)
And the vast majority of popular video games aren't Libre, so why should the driver be?
</devilsadvocate>
Re:Devil's advocate (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it's in the kernel of their operating system. Because the fact that the driver is not Libre prevents other desktop-related stuff from working because the one vendor doesn't care and nobody else can fix it. Here's an example:
Using the gratis ATI driver, running two X servers on the card crashes the driver and leaves X and the card in an unusable state (you have to ssh into the box to reboot it cleanly). This has apparently been a bug in the ATI driver for ages. And because multiple X servers are used to implement "fast user switching", ATI's crap driver blocks fast user switching.
This sort of bug would be fixed in a libre driver. It's 100% reproducible, incredibly annoying, and affects a feature in desktop environments with millions of users and thousands of developers. If I had the source code to ATI's driver I could probably fix this bug. But ATI doesn't care.
It's impossible for the Linux kernel team and X.org to design interfaces and a good model for how kernel drivers should interact with userspace X drivers to provide rendering in a way that fits in with X's model when the two biggest GPU makers will just ignore it, write their own kernel modules and their own interfaces. With a Libre driver new X.org standards and interfaces would be adopted much quicker and the drivers would fit into the system better. Nvidia and ATI care about this for Windows (to some degree) and so their drivers fit well there. On Linux they don't. But lots of other people do care, and non-Libre drivers prevent them from doing anything about it.
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Because it's in the kernel of their operating system.
Code lower than the kernel is non-free: the CPU's microcode. But you have a good point about ATI refusing to fix the problem that prevents fast user switching.
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Because the Card that the Driver is um... Driving, wasn't Free as in Beer.
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It's not a video game driver, it's a graphics driver.
And for applications of graphics other than 3D video games and 3D modeling, the 2D-accelerated driver works fine.
There's plenty of graphical Libre software.
But do they use 3D graphics with lots of triangles and complex shaders? Or do they use the big flat planes of pixels that even an Intel GMA can accelerate?
Re:How does it compare with the other NVidia drive (Score:4, Insightful)
Most people don't care about /. either, and here we are.
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Free as in freedom jackass.
Freedom isn't free!
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What card to buy today? (Score:4, Interesting)
My Dell at work has an ATI RV635 card. You know: the one that might, someday, support 3D but hasn't yet in the couple of years it's been out? I switched from Ubuntu Karmic to Fedora Core 12 a couple of weeks ago to see if the experimental drivers worked, but ended up with a non-working X.
If I want to buy a card that has working accelerated 3D today - not next week, not "maybe if I download a hack from North Korea that might work or might catch fire" - so I can do basic stuff like get smooth compositing in KDE, what should I get? Again, this is going into my computer at work, so $500 gaming cards are right out. I'm positive I can get the hardware guy to order a reasonably priced card for me (and another for himself) if it'll work on Linux, though.
BTW, let me preemptively say that I'm not gonna Google it. There are 5,000,000 outdated and spurious reports. I'd much rather discuss it with a group of peers than try to decode what some kid in Sri Lanka came up with.
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> I'd much rather discuss it with a group of peers than try to decode what
> some kid in Sri Lanka came up with.
Then why are you asking on Slashdot?
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"Peer" doesn't mean "infallible expert", or at least not among my peer group.
Re:What card to buy today? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you need/want to use a Free driver, get an older ATI card. I have a card in the R500 series and the Free 'radeon' driver works wonderfully for what I ask from it (urban terror and mplayer). Anything up to the R500's have good support atm, the R600/700 support is getting there...
If you don't care about that, get an Nvidia card and use the non-Free driver. This option will also get you the best preformance.
Re:What card to buy today? (Score:4, Informative)
And I know fuck all about Linux, so it must work easily. I read nvidia cards worked well, and it certainly seemed to go smoother than the Radeon in my old laptop.
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A motherboard with an integrated intel graphic card. They are not as fast as ATI/Nvidia, but they work great for things like desktop compositting, and the driver is the most complete and stable driver available in the FOSS world.
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A motherboard with an integrated intel graphic card.
And my IT department won't mind if I just pop in a new motherboard? :-)
In truth, no one would care (as long as it worked afterward), but I'd much rather swap in a replacement graphics card.
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If you're against closed drivers, all I will say is good luck.
If you're okay with using proprietary drivers, any Nvidia card should work fine. If you don't need fancy games or similar, the run-of-the-mill $50 cards will be plenty.
I know anecdotes are not evidence, but I haven't had any issues in the last 2 years or so getting Nvidia cards to work on my personal computers (three separate machines). My one ATI machine though, still barely manages 2d and crashes if I install the proprietary driver. I've hea
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I have an nVidia card and use the nVidia closed drivers and have no real issues.
If you are getting a new PC and FOSS purity is important to you then get Intel graphics and you will be good to go.
I have heard good things about ATI but I have no real experience with them myself..
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01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GeForce 8600 GT (rev a1)
Debian Lenny with nvidia debs from non-free, dual 19 inch DVI monitors
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An intel integrated should do the job fine. I have all the wizbang bullshit effects on my dell mini 9 and that has an intel GMA950. I turn them right off an use metacity though.
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For composited desktop with all the wobbly windows and such, tuxracer, watching DVD's, etc., the integrated intel chips are more than adequate and have great open-source support (everything except GMA 500 they use in netbooks).
I'm told they aren't so great for the latest games.
This is great - sort of (Score:4, Interesting)
I've often wondered why more reverse engineering isn't done to create Linux drivers rather than just complaining about the manufacturer of the hardware. The only unfortunate thing about this project is that Linux drivers already exist (according to other posts here).
Wouldn't it be better to reverse-engineer hardware to create Linux drivers that don't exist?
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That would be way more time-intensive and way harder....
Re:This is great - sort of (Score:5, Insightful)
Video drivers are generally considered the thing most lacking in linux. Last I heard/tried, USB wifi cards are a nightmare, but besides those, most high-profile hardware is pretty well supported. You'll always find the odd usb controlled nerf gun turret or whatnot that lacks a driver, but that's not really an issue for most people.
Furthermore, it is in error to think that people reverse engineering video cards would otherwise spend their time reverse engineering other hardware. These people do not necessarily specialize in other sorts of hardware. In linux, more people working on A does not really mean less people work on B. It's not like there is a manager at the top assigning and moving people around from task to task.
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Indeed.
Also, given that >95% of the Linux community contributes no code (or so I've heard), it's not surprising that most people rely on others to get their hardware to work (and work well).
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I've often wondered why more reverse engineering isn't done to create Linux drivers rather than just complaining about the manufacturer of the hardware.
Because these days it's really, really hard.
A modern graphics card, for example, is actually a complete computer. It's got RAM, a processor, a bunch of peripherals, a complete miniature operating system... and you don't even know what type of processor it is. A lot of peripherals work like this; a wireless card is typically an ARM processor with some RAM attached on one end to the radio and on the other to an I/O controller that talks to the computer.
So in order to reverse engineer a graphics card you b
Re:This is great - sort of (Score:4, Interesting)
``A modern graphics card, for example, is actually a complete computer. It's got RAM, a processor, a bunch of peripherals, a complete miniature operating system... and you don't even know what type of processor it is. A lot of peripherals work like this; a wireless card is typically an ARM processor with some RAM attached on one end to the radio and on the other to an I/O controller that talks to the computer.''
The big difference here is that we usually think of as a computer typically has enough specifications published that you can program them, and there are really just a couple of flavors. By comparison, even though each wireless network card does pretty much the same things as the next one, they are usually programmed completely differently and we're not told how. We have standards and heaps of documentation when it comes to CPUs, but when it comes to graphics accelerators or wireless network cards, it's a mess of undocumented, proprietary, incompatible interfaces.
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Welcome new comer! (Score:4, Insightful)
But the truth is much of what gets done in terms of development is done by people like yourself, with interests of their own and probably more frequently then you imagine, on their own time. So while the project might not make sense to every possible user, particularly in the terms of some great imaginary directed labor pool, like many open source projects it's intended to scratch the developers own particular itch. And I don't know about you, but when I sit down to program in my free time I like to do something that I'm personally (preferably even passionately) interested in.
Just for those who wonder... (Score:5, Informative)
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And I really, really wish they'd change that. It's really confusing. Especially since a big chunk of D[igital] R[ights] M[anagement] seems to be preventing the dreaded video analog hole.
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DRM in this context means Direct Rendering Manager [wikipedia.org] and not Digital Rights Management [wikipedia.org]
Thanks. I was reading through the comments looking for the usual DRM rants.
monolithic kernel (Score:2, Insightful)
Soon 2.6 will have support for the kitchen sink!
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Yes indeed. Years of dissing Windows for integrating the graphics drivers into the kernel, and what does Linux do ...
Reverse engineering (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Reverse engineering (Score:4, Informative)
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I'd have said the hardest part is reverse engineering how to talk to the hardware. If new hardware comes out they'll have to reverse engineer the new features / changes in that but they shouldn't have to start again from scratch.
Re:Reverse engineering (Score:4, Insightful)
There are many reasons why Nvidia might stop updating a driver for a particular card: they might go out of business, they might refuse to support obsolete cards that they no longer sell, etc. So over time, even if you still own their hardware, it will stop working at full potential (or at all) with the latest Linux. You'd need to download a newer driver, and if that's no option, you'd need to buy youself a new card, or you'd need to refuse to upgrade your Linux etc.
If you expect your hardware to always work with Linux, then with closed source you need Nvidia to react to all changes that may happen to keep your card working, whereas with an open source driver there's potentially millions of people who can be persuaded to keep your card working.
What about BSD? (Score:2, Interesting)
So, currently there is an issue with xorg 7.5 being imported into FreeBSD due very Linux specific driver "hacks", specifically in the latest Intel drivers and the ATI radeon drivers. Is this the same issue? Will this Nouveau driver work on anything else or is "open source" becoming synonymous with "if it runs on Linux, that's good enough". Linux has achieved great strides, but far too many "open source" developers target Linux only and have blinders on to any other open source OS or UNIX'esque OS where this
Cost of Drivers is a Tax Now? (Score:2)
If Linux has free alternatives to nvidia drivers and I don't use nvidia drivers, then I should get a discount on my next purchase of an nvidia card since part of that cost goes into development of the drivers.
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If I buy a car, then paint it myself, do I get a discount on the car since some of the cost payed for painting it originally?
I mean, give me a break, I'm probably considered huge FOSS appologist and proprietary software hater, but even I think that is stupid.
Good news. Next stop: The Future (Score:3, Insightful)
This is good stuff, I think. They're not going to shove the whole Nouveau device driver into the kernel, it'll follow the modern X.org / Linux model of having kernel modesetting and a DRM driver in the kernel and a whole load of other stuff living in userspace.
Kernel modesetting (KMS) means that one entity, the kernel, always controls what graphics mode the video card is in. That's useful because pre-KMS, X.org might have changed the mode *without the kernel knowing*. That's one reason Linux can't easily have a Blue Screen Of Death - the kernel doesn't know what it can send to the graphics card to display it. BSOD isn't a feature you want to *see* but if you have a kernel panic, it'd be a lot more useful to actually see it, rather than it being hidden by your frozen X server! I'm not aware of graphical kernel panics currently being supported but at least it could be done in principle now, AIUI. KMS also reduces unnecessary modeswitching "to make sure" that you otherwise get, so switching between console and X should be quicker, as should switching between X sessions (fast user switching). KMS is also what's used by the new bootsplashes, like RedHat's Plymouth (which other distros, e.g. Mandriva) are also moving towards. DRM, in this context, is the Direct Rendering Manager and is how GL apps get direct rendering access to the graphics card, in a controlled way. I don't know so much about that though ;-)
The Nvidia open source driver "nv" doesn't support KMS or any 3D. The Nvidia proprietary driver doesn't support KMS but does support 3D (with good performance). Many distros have tended to use nv by default, some do ship nvidia though. Either way, you don't get the nice boot splash and neater terminal switching that a KMS driver would get you. The Nvidia proprietary driver is good performance-wise but it also tends to lag the open source drivers in terms of features a little; I think Nouveau (at one point? may not still be true) was aiming to support Xrandr features that Nvidia's did not. I've also heard that Nvidia's driver has issues with suspend.
Because of all this, expanding Nouveau support is a good thing. Nouveau are also in the process of reverse engineering for 3D support but they have some way to go. However, I've had the impression that it's getting towards being better than the 2D-only nv driver. So at *least* it will mean that when installing on your system you can expect a decent boot experience and correctly-working basic 2D graphics, with suspend/resume behaving sensible, etc. So it could be making life better for users *soon*. But as 3D support improves, things should get better still.
The Linux kernel devs generally take a stance these days that all kernel code ought to be merged into Linus's tree as soon as possible. It's really rather impressive to see this process working and the kernel devs (mostly) really following through on this.
Re:I'm not an Avid Linux User... (Score:5, Informative)
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For 3D. For 2D it's already better. Good 2D is underappreciated, but matters most for a lot of stuff that people casually use computers for.
Obviously, gamers care about 3D, but good 2D matters also more than you might know for gamers into 80s/90s emulation - it's quite disappointing that even today, emulators sometimes fail to reliably vsync, really doesn't recreate the classic experience of amiga or snes gaming if frame rates aren't a rock solid tear-free 60Hz (or 50Hz depending on territory).
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The people who are using nvidia's driver obviously care about 3d performance otherwise they'd already be using the open source driver with 2d support. Also, I doubt nouveau has the hardware accelerated playback of mpeg-2, vc-1 and h.264 like the closed drivers.
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The people who are using nvidia's driver obviously care about 3d performance otherwise they'd already be using the open source driver with 2d support.
Not so much. I have an Ubuntu desktop box with an NVidia card (work system; I didn't spec it), and the open source driver seemed to have a number of issues when running dual head. I flipped to the binary driver, it just worked, and haven't looked back. It sounds like the Nouveau driver will bring some substantial forward progress to open source NVidia drivers. ( No thanks to NVidia themselves. :-P )
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or 2D it's already better.
Do you have any benchmarks that aren't 2+ years old and were comparing nouveau to the ancient NV drivers?
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Ok, I may be dating myself here, but way back in 2000 we were telling people in the Nvidia support channel that GLXGEARS IS NOT A BENCHMARK. Nvidia spent a LOT of time over the years putting absurd amounts of time into over-optimizing the performance of that small snippet of code, and a few others, simply because they noticed that certain clueless noobs were using it as a performance metric.
The ONLY purpose of glxgears as it was designed is to indicate if software or hardware acceleration of 3D was happenin
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Now if we could just get a stable nVidia driver in Windows, we'll be set.
-JJS
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*sigh*
The DRM module we're talking about is the Direct Rendering Manager. That means bypassing userspace layers and directly talking to the kernel which then talks to the graphics card.
You could run hardware accelerated graphics on Linux for ages and ages and ages ago. What stone have you been living under?
I was playing Quake 3 since the Pentium3 days, with hardware OpenGL acceleration on Linux.
Maybe you should watch a video in which somebody plays Crysis on Linux? -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ147 [youtube.com]
Linus in a snit (Score:2, Insightful)
Reading Linus' remarks, I can't help but think what a childish, whinging prat he is. He makes Theo look calm, cool, and collected.
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No that is what wine has meant for ages. Heck, crossover(the pay for version of wine) added l4d2 support the night the game came out.
I lol'd (Score:2)
Linux already has a closed source driver from Nvidia that works pretty damn well.
A driver that breaks suspend and hibernate, needs power management tweaks to allow the PC to boot without freezing up and makes compiz hang on a regular basis "works pretty damn well?" Maybe you're talking about the Nvidia control panel for Linux? It's very handy for helping you fiddle with settings in a futile attempt to get the awful thing to work.
I'm looking forward to this new driver but I already learned my lesson about Nvidia and Linux.
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Re:Why not just use the Windows driver model.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Because Nouveau works on a more architectures than Windows has ever been ported to.
Re:Why not just use the Windows driver model.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not all architectures have PCIe, but some people still have PCI video cards that they'd like to use.
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Because Nouveau works on a more architectures than Windows has ever been ported to.
Technically not true, especially in the context of any platform that has NVidia hardware.
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You clearly know nothing about writing drivers, let alone video drivers, for Windows.
Windows video drivers do not "generally include kernel components". That's complete bullshit. The driver itself can be considered a "kernel component". But otherwise, any Windows graphics driver just implements a certain well-defined interface, and only calls certain well-defined kernel functions.
There is nothing technical stopping the Linux kernel, the FreeBSD kernel, the Solaris kernel, the Mac OS X kernel, and whatever o
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He's forcing the point. If you are the one upon whom the point is being forced, I guess you could see it in the way you've described, but it's just a tactic for making the right thing happen. To the extent that you can say anything is his job, this is his job. Linux wouldn't be where it is today, for better or for worse, without Linus being the benevolent tyrant.