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."
Re:I'm not an Avid Linux User... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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.
Just for those who wonder... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This is great - sort of (Score:2, Informative)
That would be way more time-intensive and way harder....
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.
Debugging advantage of a Free driver (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Just for those who wonder... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
3d support is in Gallium3D (Score:1, Informative)
And here is the page that describes current 3d support in Gallium3D: http://www.x.org/wiki/GalliumStatus [x.org]
Notice the sea of grey under the nVidia chipsets. So if you want games, keep using the binary for now.
Re:What card to buy today? (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Debugging advantage of a Free driver (Score:3, Informative)
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."
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.
Re:This is great - sort of (Score:3, Informative)
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 both need to decompile your way through multiple megabytes of binary blob driver that runs on the PC, but also decompile your way through multiple megabytes of binary blob operating system image that runs on the card... and you don't even know what the CPU architecture is!
It's actually more productive to hassle the manufacturers into releasing documentation. Which in some ways is a pity; it would be really cool to be able to run your own bare-metal OS on the GPU.
Re:What card to buy today? (Score:2, Informative)
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
Re:I lol'd (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Reverse engineering (Score:4, Informative)
Re:How does it compare with the other NVidia drive (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:What card to buy today? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:What card to buy today? (Score:2, Informative)
ATI Radeon 4890 with binary ATI driverse works well for me under Ubuntu 9.10.