Nouveau Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Achieves OpenCL Support

An anonymous reader writes "The Nouveau driver project that's been writing an open-source NVIDIA graphics driver via reverse-engineering has moved forward in their support. The Nouveau driver now has OpenCL acceleration support to do GPGPU computing on the open-source community driver for several generations of GeForce GPUs."

Re:What about OpenGL ?

[gr8_phk]

I don't like the binary blobs for because they 1) break when I get automatic updates that include a kernel 2) don't support the new 3d architecture and hence will 3) not work with Wayland when it matures. OTOH nouveau is completely painless to use for 2D ( I run Fedora ) but sucks for 3D. I can't run blender. Gnome 3 is very laggy when it works. I can't run Neverball for very long. Yet they think this driver needs OpenCL? WTF? Between Gnome3 and nouveau I need to buy new hardware, and it won't be nVidia this time. I just want my desktop and some OGL apps to work out of the box.

Re:If only...

[Skapare]

They license lots of code from companies who wouldn't want the source released.

Then release it without those parts and the community can fill in the gaps. Also, document the interface of the hardware.

Also, they gain nothing by doing so.

They get a more solid and reliable code base through the community eyes.

Re:What about OpenGL ?

[chrb]

AMD/ATI isn't really any better. The open source drivers suck just like Nouveau.

Not my experience. I've been using ATI with open source drivers for years now and have had very few issues. I did have problems with Nouveau though and ended up swapping out the card out for an ATI one.

(the multiple monitor support is absolute shit compared to Windows or OSX).

I have a dualhead DVI setup with an AMD DMS-59 card and it works fine. What exactly do you think is missing in Linux? Last time I installed, Ubuntu auto-detected the dualhead setup, and it was a single mouse click to swap from mirror image to left/right screen. I know that using multiple cards for a multiple monitor setup doesn't work very well in Xorg - but I've also heard the same about Windows.