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Nouveau NVIDIA Driver To Enter Linux 2.6.33 Kernel
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."
But does this mean I could run a Video game?
Does this mean the "But does it run on Linux" Jokes will come to an end?
.. and directly load those superior and polished drivers?
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...?
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 There are 5,000,000 outdated and spurious reports.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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
How do the Nouveau Nvidia drivers compare to the official ones?
Slower on every machine I've tested.
I'm curious about this too. I've used the official NVidia driver in Linux for many years and never had a problem. What was the compelling reason to reverse engineer?
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
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.
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.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
I don't know about you, but I've never paid for a driver in my life.
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.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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?
Because of this, I'm going with ATI next time, I've heard they're way more Linux friendly now.
Have fun enjoying your extremely crappy drivers. Both the open source and the proprietary ATI drivers suck.
If all that mattered was that it was free you might as well stick to the generic 2d drivers. Most people want performant 3d drivers.
Sigh...
Gratis vs. Libre
Look it up.
DRM in this context means Direct Rendering Manager and not Digital Rights Management
Hahahahahahahahahahahah!
Oh god that's funny
My computers have ATI ... their drivers make me cry. Once I had the binary driver working. Then I upgraded. It stopped working. (For i = 1:20, repeat the last two steps). Then they said my year old IGP card was too old, and stop supporting it with new driver releases.
Open source stuff works OK, but not as good for hi-def video.
Which is a distinction most people won't care about when their "gratis" driver can't properly play their 3d games.
The official ones are free, too.
Free as in freedom jackass.
Hardware video card support is pretty darn important these days, especially with more and more calculations (even not graphics related) being possible on the GPU and non-game applications using 3D acceleration to render 2D things faster, so I really, really, hope that Linux (and the free software in general) will have a good solution to run stuff on any GPU as good as it can run stuff on a CPU right now, because otherwise it'll lag behind and prevent applications that use that instead of the classical CPU + software rendered 2D graphics combination.
Most people don't care about /. either, and here we are.
Dilbert RSS feed
monolithic kernel is monolithic!
Soon 2.6 will have support for the kitchen sink!
You've probably paid for it with operating system crashes. Your time spent waiting for a reboot, re-creating lost work, and troubleshooting the failure is probably worth money. If a driver is Free (in the GNU sense), developers of the kernel and the X server can trace into it to see what's going wrong. Interactions with black boxes are much harder to debug.
Reverse engineering a complete video driver is an impressive feat. However it is a reactive process and not a proactive process. Presumably when NVidia changes their driver architecture (to suit future hardware) won't this all have to be done over from scratch?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
And the vast majority of popular video games aren't Libre, so why should the driver be?
</devilsadvocate>
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.
The confidence of ignorance will always overcome the indecision of knowledge.
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.
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 stuff should really be able to run.
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.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
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.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
Good Point! I was a little confused by the reference too.
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.
Just check the feature matrix
3D features are not really supported, but except that, most of the basic things seem to be supported - KMS, KMS-based FB, suspend/resume, dual head/randr, 2D, video...
But a tyrant still.
And not always benevolent (cf BK vs Tridge).
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
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
DRM in this context means Direct Rendering Manager and not Digital Rights Management
Thanks. I was reading through the comments looking for the usual DRM rants.
And here is the page that describes current 3d support in Gallium3D: http://www.x.org/wiki/GalliumStatus
Notice the sea of grey under the nVidia chipsets. So if you want games, keep using the binary for now.
Closed components in the ecosystem slow down development and make everything more difficult for us free software developers.
I have had nothing but trouble with my ATI linux drivers. Granted, it was an older and a mobile card, but it was a pain to get 3D working at all. Actually, not that old - X1400 Mobile, I believe.
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.
Free as in freedom jackass.
Freedom isn't free!
Bow-ties are cool.
Open source stuff works OK, but not as good for hi-def video.
Is the hi-def video open content?
For a few months now I had issues with both HD 3850 at home, and HD 4870 at work. It keeps probing my monitor for available modes, and that makes a lot of stuff slower/non-workin. Wine usage if out of question. At home I could still watch videos, its not possible at work tho. But at work I had more updated version of Linux, so perhaps thats why. Right now I'm using Windows as host for Virtualbox where I run my Ubuntu - it works better that way. Mind, that this error is also true for Gentoo (or it was a few months ago, when I ditched Linux at home). I think that ubuntu 7.10 works good with Radeons, so u might try that. Just don't update it (not just drivers, X as well).
Anyway, Linux friendliness could be true, as I hear they are trying to open up documentation for their drivers so that community can make open-source ones better. But it doesn't mean, that right now Radeon drivers are better. At least not the one provided by AMD.
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.
Bow-ties are cool.
Nothing can stop the analog hole for noninteractive video. It is always possible to camcord the screen, and an MPAA representative actually recommended it. The only surefire way to plug the analog hole is to make video games instead of movies.
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.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
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.
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.
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.
Ah, ATI. Lovely... just lovely memories of ATI under Linux. Like how it would somehow stutter the visuals on Puzzle Pirates last time I tried them. Let me repeat that: It would stutter the visuals on a dead-simple 2D sprite-based Java game. Not some bullet hell, eighty bazillion sprites on the screen, special effects whoring, framebuffer coder's wet dream 2D game. Puzzle. Pirates. One install of an older NVidia card fixed that right up.
Yes, I know, durr hurr javas slow so thats y it so slow im so funy durrrrrr hurrrrrr. Cute. Go fuck yourself. No video card, nor their drivers, open source or not, should be the cause of even the slightest bit of slowdown when trying to render Puzzle Pirates, of all games.
I've not touched an ATI card since then under Linux, and I've not had a single video-based problem.
Linux developers can arbitrarily stop supporting whatever they damn well don't feel like supporting any longer so they can go program extra functions into their USB foam dart cannon. Just sayin'.
mmmm...forbidden donut
Crap... I was just going to sent them DMCA toke-down notification. Oh well, next time.
nVidia IP Officer
Reading Linus' remarks, I can't help but think what a childish, whinging prat he is. He makes Theo look calm, cool, and collected.
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
Why don't they just fork it like they do EVERYTHING ELSE so that they can be ideologically licensoligically "pure"?
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.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
SO how does Nouveau work with hibernate/sleep?
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.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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.
That was true 3-6 months ago. The latest open source drivers work perfectly, and the fglrx linux drivers worked great on my 3xxx series card, but not my 4770. Furthermore X1400 is either R4xx based or R5xx based, *NOT* R600 based, and thus supported by the open source drivers (since the r400/500 were basically just evolutions of the R300 chips, and documentation for them was release over a year ago.)
PS: your answer is "yes". But you think for a good reason.
i tried Fedora 12 and the last thing i see is the nouveau messages and then the screen goes black. the laptop continues to boot, i just can't see what it's doing. if i hit ctrl-alt-delete it'll reboot and the wifi light comes on so i think it's all ok apart from the screen. (12 beta was fine as it didn't use nouveau but i did one upgrade too many. have tried the F12 live cd and it's the same)
have tried nouveau.modeset=1 whilst booting (a list of other options would be nice, but i couldn't find one). have tried disabling the module. i've deleted all the nouveau drivers from the root partition in an attempt to force it to use something else but i guess it's using the versions in the initrd file(?). have tried booting single user. nothing.
other people have raised this as a bug but all the developers do is ask them to post further details. but they can't because they can't see what it's doing. is kinda frustrating.
(this with a newish 130M btw)
For me small things like security and stability.
The blob has a history of security problems and stability problems, and on my machine nouveau is just so much more stable then the nvidia binary driver.
Then features like KMS, having the possibility to rebuild for new API/ABIs yourself, and so on is just nice bonuses.
The only thing nouveau is lacking currently is stable 3d, but it has become better, and with kernel inclusion I have a feeling nouveau will get more exposed and more fixed, which leaves the current devs free for mesa-tasks.
But speedwise in 2d it is nearly comparable to nvidia-binary on my card.
It is just a point of - like with radeon and intel - have the latest pieces on the right places (xorg-server-1.6 has known speed problems with nouveau and so on).
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.
--srj/mmv
I'm a Linux user using the official binary NVidia drivers, they work bad - very bad even, they handle suspend/resume and hibernation like a falling egg handles the ground and no combination of settings fixes the horrendous diagonal tearing during video playback.
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...?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You're also forgetting issues that come up on supported hardware platforms, but aren't marked as a priority of NVIDIA's in-house developers to fix. NVIDIA also drops support for older cards, so a newer driver may not support your older card. If the last driver version to support your older card has a bug in it? Tough luck!
Having access to the source and the freedom to modify it allows people that are motivated enough to fix these issues.
I'm thinking of going with Intel on my Linux machines from now on. the only problem is that the TV-out on laptops is a crapshoot (at least with some of the older 9xx adapters, in my experience). Apart from the laptop TV-out issues I've only had one Intel adapter not work perfectly right off the bat - on a server running CentOS.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This irks some free software hippies and it also makes using Nvidia hardware on unsupported hardware platforms more difficult.
That's a little ingenious. Video drivers are complex and can bring a machine down. People complain to the kernel developers about it, but there's no way they can look for bugs in a closed source package from the likes of NVidia.
Should you need to update the kernel for a simple security fix or new feature, you are at the mercy of NVidia releasing another binary release to match the kernel. They drag their feet doing this, so if you want your core code up to date, you have to dump NVidia's driver or wait several weeks. Not everyone wants to do that.
Finally, both NV and ATI cheat in their drivers to gain better performance test numbers. Having an open source driver is really going to put pressure on them, as the project allows others to wade in and offer improvements.
Don’t do it. Whatever you heard. I have personal experience with the “drivers” right now. And compared to them, the nVidia ones are a wonderful dreamland of milk and honey. (Talking about the proprietary fglrx drivers.)
The Linux “team” of ATi is a one-man-show, and focuses only on workstations. Everything else is simply ignored.
Sometimes out of luck, they drop some crumbs of features that are useful. But they only got compositing some weeks ago.
Video playback still is horrible, with only mpeg2-style codecs accelerated. And so badly rendered, that you basically have to turn it off.
Like applying a lens effect on the histogram. glowing white, deep black, nearly nothing in-between.
You can expect weird crashes, that do not happen when I then boot with the nVidia onboard card and try again.
They only just updated the driver to support the new kernel interfaces, after the old ones they used were so outdated, that they were completely removed from the kernel!
There are other weird graphics errors with areas not being redrawn.
And if X crashes, you can expect to press the cold reset button, because you can’t get to any console anymore.
Also don’t dare to switch to a console and back too quickly, or do it at all, without atieventsd running. Because then you also have to reset.
And that is for the 4850! I don’t think that with the 5xxx series it will be better than back when the 4xxx was new. (When neither compositing, nor Xinerama or video playback worked at all. Let alone all of them together.)
ATi have great hardware, but really really bad drivers. For Windows too (ask any game or demo developer). Just there it’s less visible because everybody knows how to route around.
If you’re not planning on using a card that’s at least one or two generations back, with the open radeon (or radeonhd) drivers, stay faar away from ATi.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
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)
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
I use NVidia's closed drivers for Linux on my 8800GT and I have never, ever experienced a crash or lockup. Even when playing games like Team Fortress 2 with a maxed out resolution for hours at a time, never a crash. On the other hand, my completely open Intel drivers on this here work PC has caused three hard locks just this week while running the glxgears screen saver.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
It costs folks like you and me
So because the ACPI is a little buggy the software is complete crap? Never mind every other feature that the software has.
I'm sure the competitions graphics cards are even better.
Well yes, but the code is still out there, and can still be compiled with newer kernels, unlike the binaries, which tend to only work with certain versions. Just sayin'.
<sig> </sig>
...using the GUI that is. Ubuntu's Live CDs have had problems with the nv driver on the Live CD producing green vertical lines with certain video cards for a long while. Also, the VESA driver is broken and reloads xorg every half-second (the nv driver is better because at least a virt term works).
Download a Fedora 12 live CD. Make a bootable USB flash drive from it and just try it. Bugs vary from GPU to GPU, so this is a great way to try Nouveau with whatever you've got. Of course this is 2D only, but you're interested in video playback, so that's fine.
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?)
They are seen as more Linuxfriendly because they have released the specifications for their 3d chipsets which Nvidia hasn't. Unfortunately, and contrary to what slashdot-commenters believed, that hasn't lead to someone creating high quality free drivers for ATI cards.
Football Odds
3D on a computer monitor is a delusion, you have height and width, that third dimension is the delusion that is implemented by software to give the appearance of depth. it is not like you can reach in to your screen like it really had depth, (nothing wrong with good hardware acceleration with decent screen resolution and color definition (at least 16, but 24 is better)
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Either I missed the force of your post or you mixed up gratis and libre.
I assume you are meaning to say that people don't care whether it's open source if it doesn't work as well as the free-but-closed-source alternative.
Mod points: Guaranteed to remove your sense of humor.
Side effects may include gullibility and temporary retardation
Mandriva also ships with Nouveau, but that don't seems to be mentioned. Also other distros ship it?
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.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
I don't hibernate my nvidia machine, but sleep works with my Quadro NVS 140M just fine. Better than nvidia in fact (which like to go back to sleep after waking up). Some minor corruption before the screen is unlocked, but is doesn't last. It's worked since August-ish with Fedora 11 and continues into Fedora 12.
Yes, but if the devs do this, *someone* can do the support in the future. If nvidia drops your chipset, you're SOL.
I guess if we need a car analogy we need a car analogy.
As much as I enjoyed the dessert analogy I think you went a little to the extreme.
It's more like if you had a car but the radio doesn't work. You can fully enjoy the car but a feature of the car that is completely disconnected from the core purpose of the vehicle doesn't work.
Our bugs are smarter than your test scripts.
Your analogy fails because the ACPI bug doesn't cause the entire system to become unstable and unusable... Unlike your killer pastry.
It would be more analogous to driving around in a BMW that works perfectly, except for an air vent in the rear passenger side of the vehicle which seems to get no air flow.
It makes using older nvidia hardware with recent software *impossible*. Nvidia cuts support for old stuff to force you to upgrade even if you're not an uber-gamer and are happy with your current performance.
Enjoy the hardware upgrade hamster-wheel.
"Because of this, I'm going with ATI next time, I've heard they're way more Linux friendly now."
I haven't been following this so closely, but my impression was that ATI is doing a better job of working with the community at this point--giving adequate access to specs and so on, as opposed to just dropping a binary driver in our laps--which means in months and years to come ATI is likely to work better. But for now it may still have catching up to do.
From my limited experience in recent years, Intel hardware is the only stuff with first-class open-source support. (But of course the best drivers in the world don't help if their hardware isn't good enough to run your game. I wouldn't know--for compiz, watching DVD's, and the occasional game of Tuxracer, the Intel stuff is fine.)
Windows driver signing can be to blame, too. There's a lot of money lost in that pit that gets sent to Microsoft when new drivers are made.
NVIDIA has already effectively done this with all the pre-GeForce 5xxx cards. You can still get their last drivers, but they won't work on any remotely modern distribution.
It's ALL "copyrighted" at least in the US. If I write some screed it is "copyrighted." LINUX IS PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT. Anything GPL IS PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT. STOP confusing "copyright" with "proprietary" or "non GPL" it does nothing but cloud the issue further in the mind of an ignorant public that believes you are only protected by copyright if you're a giant corporation or a slave to one.
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.
This is perhaps not the most common use of Linux, but some of us use it for recording.
The official NVidia drivers are not real time safe, which can cause problems for people using Linux for low latency audio work.
There is no way to fix this without having the source code.
If you use an RT patched kernel, the official Nvidia drivers will sometimes not even install.
The open source 2d Xorg drivers are OK most of the time, but some people use PD/Gem or Blender+Ardour etc and need 3d *and* good audio performance.
I love posts like this because it demonstrates a dramatic (and frequent) misunderstanding. The idea seems to be (and I don't mean to fault anyone for this) that there's a great big general pool of Linux/driver developers that get together and decide what to do. We regularly see suggestions (like the one above) directed at how to make better use of this imaginary pool.
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.
Quack, quack.
But is it noticeably slower, or just a benchmark thing?
Or is this one of those videophile things like gold plated HDMI connectors and frame rates faster than the monitor refresh?
I'll be the 30th person to chime in and say that I just threw out another ATI card on a Linux Media Center and bought an NVIDIA card. You don't want to go anywhere near ATI. Especially if you're hooking the card up to a TV that gives bad EDID data.
It's only videophiles who care about the exact amount of pixels on the screen.
Most normal people can't tell the difference between uncompressed video and lossy anyway.
Of course, there will always be some who like 'hi-def' and gold plated cables for their game console!
http://www.pspworld.com/sony-psp/accessories/accessory-overkill-goldplated-video-cable-for-psp-010808.php
Some Linux developers are also users of said cards, so they have a real need to fulfil.
The Mach64 drivers received updates until 2007 (when the dev's laptop failed), although it only supported 10 year old cards, like the ATI RAGEs.
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I am willing to bet that both is equally impossible to almost everyone.
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
I'm not sure that what you are asking, is reasonable. You bought a scanner that worked with the PC you bought. Then you upgraded your PC or bought a new one. And now you complain that the vendor dos not help you for free with the upgrade.
Let me put this in a car analogy. You have a car and you bought a baby seat with it. Then you buy a new car. Now the baby seat does not fit. The vendor could easily supply you with a cheap, plastic piece that makes it fit safely and snugly. You want it for free, while the vendor has a newer model available that fits.
Just because it is a printer driver, which is software, does not mean that it is easy or free to make. Or that it was included in the printer price.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Does this have VDPAU support ready? Planned? On ANY horizon?
If so, hooray!
If not, worthless for everyone who chose nvidia over ATI for this killer feature.
What? I don't understand.
Car analogy now!
The official ATI drivers suck badly with barley working 32 bit drivers and mostly useless 64 bit support.
I hear the NVIDIA drivers are working much more ricely. Some people have even said they're amaizing
Thing is, you've not seen the device I'm talking about. It's not scanner "2.0", which is much improved over the previous version. It's not even that old, it was bought maybe a year before the switch to the 64 bit version.
No, the new model is pretty much version 1.1. It looks identical. It has identical specs, as far as I can tell. The changes made to it are effectively cosmetic. It probably even talks pretty much the same protocol as the previous one. Linux certainly has no problems with talking to both of them, it's only Windows what has an issue.
See, that's not the way I see it. The way I see it, is that I didn't buy a scanner for Win XP, I bought a scanner, period. It shouldn't ever stop working for any reasons besides physically breaking, becoming so technically obsolete that it makes no sense to keep using it, or becoming impossible to connect (like if USB some day disappears).
Linux fulfills this idea of mine. I can still use a Creative Webcam 5 on it, which is positively ancient by modern standards (it's a USB 1 webcam). There are no XP 64 drivers of course, but 64 bit Linux works perfectly fine with it.
I think long term, so I consistently choose standards and openness whenever possible, because it's not in my interest to replace things that work perfectly fine just because the manufacturer would prefer to have a bigger number in the bank account.
So give me specs and the source, I'll fix it, and even submit a patch to the upstream.
They work better than ATI's fglrx but they are far from amazing. NVIDIA has working 64 bit support and they only seem to lag the kernel by a little bit.
Need to boot an old kernel? You will need to reinstall your NVIDIA drivers. Install a new kernel? Reboot then install the new drivers instead of compiling everything in advance. It also won't install while X is running and if the Direct Rendering module isn't loaded X won't start either.
Thank you.
not much more to say, really.
~men are from earth. women are from earth. deal with it.~
You heard wrong or are just outright lying. I choose the latter because you reek of fanboi.
ATI and Intel both release documents for their hardware and actively work on X.org themselves to ensure that their hardware works. The default ati and intel drivers in Mesa are maintained by their respective companies now. Every release gets magnitudes more performance with their cards as X.org becomes more capable of taking full advantage of them. Meanwhile, nVidia becomes even more of a headache for everyone because other people have to do the work to maintain backwards compatibility with their binary blob.
nVidia simply refuses all efforts to be a good neighbor, or even act competitive in this case. But because many of the Linux world still live in 2005, when ATI (pre-AMD buyout) refused to give Linux any attention, still cling to your nVidia blob driver regardless, they have no incentive. Plus, if you haven't noticed, Linux isn't exactly the gaming market nVidia is after anyway.
OPs opinions are not the facts, they are just FUD. nVidia is the very distant last in terms of Linux support. Even VIA does more to support Chrome. You can find actual benchmarks around http://www.phoronix.com/
Disclaimer: I rub elbows with some people from X.org.
Please show me a patch by someone who isn't paid very good by a large company to do that.
The advantage of free software is that you can pay any sufficiently large company, like Canonical, to do the work. Non-free software limits you to a single publisher that can refuse outright to do the work.
I actually notice the difference between under 9000 and over 9000 FPS, you insensitive clod!
proud caffeine whore
Hence the "unsupported hardware platforms" bit, I believe. Whenever we Free Software supporters use the phrase, for some reason most people automatically think "NetBSD on a toaster" instead of "64-bit CPUs". Hopefully as 64-bit CPUs increase in use and more people get screwed by lazy manufacturers, they'll start to take notice.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
ATI's closed-source driver is Hell on Earth. The one that shipped with Ubuntu 9.04 caused the first crash I had ever seen of a Linux machine not caused by hardware problems *five* minutes after first use, and even the latest ones still have problems playing full-screen video.
The open-source drivers on the other hand are reliable, solid, and even support 3D acceleration in many (though not all) chips. The only problem is that it's development is pretty fast so if you don't run a rolling release distro ala Arch or Gentoo, you end up reading about lots of cool features you can't try 'til your distro bothers with making a new release.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
I would say that the Nouveau project is evidence that there are some users who would trade some convenience for freedom.
I have an ATI card with Ubuntu 9.10. It is a nightmare. It is not stable with the open driver and it simply does not work with ATI binary driver.
I used to have a laptop with NVidia, it was easier and more stable.
Actually AMD/ATI has changed their attitude in last two years and have pushed lot of stuff which is obsoleted from binary driver into open source 'radeon' one, giving docs to developers along the way. It might be slow and some cards in the middle are left out in the cold (when distros and Xorg fail to include open sourced support in time), but it's improving. For two years I had laptop which has ATI Radeon Mobility X1600 (I think), which support in binary drivers starting with Ubuntu Gutsy was nightmare. And vola, in next release support was already in free 'radeon' driver! I was quite surprised.
In result, I have a little bit more faith in AMD than with Nvidia, which in fact have no plans at all to ever opensource or provide docs for any cards, even stuff they don't even sell anymore. Therefore nouveau effort is that important. When Nvidia will be gone or they will drop support for old cards, there will be nowhere else to go but with nouveau.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
The "official" Nvidia driver doesn't work in IBM 370 based systems.
Not all the world is x86 you know.
Also there's this little idea of "Freedom" (or "Openness" if you're an ESR fan).
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Linux developers can arbitrarily stop supporting whatever they damn well don't feel like supporting any longer so they can go program extra functions into their USB foam dart cannon. Just sayin'.
True...but lots of old drivers probably just need recompiling to keep working fine, with no real 'support' required. That's probably why my CanoScan N650U still works with the latest Linux kernel despite not being supported by any Windows version after XP.
Do you think any end user cares?
I care, alot. Lemote Yeeloong + coreboot + GNU GRUB + gNewSense.
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
Or if you want to run on unsupported platforms (like FreeBSD 8.0-AMD64) you're S.O.L. NVidia seem to have zero interest in fixing the deficiency of their closed source driver there, and the FreeBSD people seem to have little interest in implementing a couple of Linux-specific features just so the driver will boot.
A good free version can be ported to wherever it's needed and might mean I can finally use FreeBSD-64 on my desktop like I'd like to.
I drink to make other people interesting!
Sorry, but you are flat out false! :) Unintentionally, but still.
I know what you meant. But you misunderstood me.
The 4800 series did not even exist in 2007 back then. And that is what I was talking about.
Because compositing did not work before version 9.8 for those cards. That version is only some weeks old.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Hey moderator! Have you even had contact with the driver developers? Have you debugged the drivers? Have you sat for a whole week straight, trying to get pre-9.8 drivers to work with a 4800? I have!
Come here to my place! I’ll show you that every single of my statements is a fact! Don’t hide in your basement! Get here! And then you can think about moderating topics you don’t know shit about!
So don’t tell me I’m freakin’ trolling you trollerator!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I got an nVidia GT 240 1GB and it's not supported by even the BETA Linux driver, it works but I'm getting 3d trashing and GLX failures that I wasn't getting with my 9600 GT. In the 180 driver, it wasn't even correctly identified... it seemed slow, but wasn't so crashy. Very odd.
Anyway, nVidia isn't always the answer. Either way, you have to buy older hardware, not the latest stuff, if you want it to work properly on Linux.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In case you hadn't noticed, ACPI is a fairly crucial part of the system on a laptop. Unless you enjoy getting your legs fried and no battery lifetime at all. And yes, nVidia's power-saving functions are severely broken. Last time I tried the official driver on a laptop, I found out I had to run a uniprocessor kernel to get any support for ACPI at all. If you think giving up half your CPU is a good trade, I have only one description for you: fanboi.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Are you kidding? The radeonhd driver is just fine. It doesn't support all chipsets 100% just yet, but the ones that are supported work great. Unless of course you define 'high quality' as 'highest framerates possible and damn the stability of the system' like nVidia fanbois tend to do.
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Actually AMD/ATI has changed their attitude in last two years
ATI 'changed their attitude' the day after AMD bought them. :)
AMD has always been a more open/FOSS friendly company than either NV or ATI.
The buyout happened more than 2 years ago, its just taken some time for AMD to sort through everything and get up to speed with their support of non-Windows on the graphics side of things, since after all, they basically had to start from scratch (ATI was just as uninterested in non-Windows arches as NV still is).
Hey moderator! ... every single of my statements is a fact
This one isn't:
The Linux “team” of ATi is a one-man-show, and focuses only on workstations. Everything else is simply ignored.
You missed the part where AMD has devs working on the open driver as well.
As for the rest of your rant, everyone knows the fglrx driver sucks on Linux. What has changed is that ATI is now a subdivision of AMD, and the future of ATI graphics on Linux will be the open driver that is being (rapidly) developed as we speak, and in the end it'll be much better than anything NV is willing to provide.
Anyone brave enough to use that in-development version of AMD's open driver already knows what the future is going to look like. Give AMD another year or two to stabilize the open driver and bring it up to speed on chip support, performance tweaking, and handling corner-cases, and once that work makes it into the mainstream Linux releases, they will end up changing the world of Linux graphics support (as we've known it) forever.
After all, their driver will be entirely found within either the kernel (KMS) or Xorg itself (DRM/Mesa), so you'll no longer need a separate binary blob/package just to get hardware-accelerated 2D & 3D (anyone with AMD-ATI hardware will thus get all this goodness right out of the box, as soon as they install Linux). And thats just for starters...
They're certainly nowhere near as Linux-friendly as Nvidia.
NV is Linux-friendly? Does that mean MS is merely 'Linux-neutral'? :)
No offense, but I think your definition of what a friend is... needs a little work.
As for AMD-ATI, give them another year or so, and check their open driver again. I'm sure that you'll be pleasantly surprised then (I'm using that in-development open driver now).
I certainly hope you are trolling because if not, this is a new level of ignorance that I was not aware existed.
Oh I don't know, I usually find ignorance and trolling actually go hand-in-hand...
The good trolls are often pretty funny, or at least clever in construction in my experiance. Generally I consider unintelligent trolls to be more flamebait.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
But ACPI isn't completely disconnected from the core purpose of a notebook computer. The effect is more like having the engine fall out onto the street every time you put the car into reverse than not being able to listen to "Queen's Greatest Hits" while driving.
The good trolls are often pretty funny, or at least clever in construction in my experiance. Generally I consider unintelligent trolls to be more flamebait.
I agree, the clever ones are actually very entertaining. Unfortunately, for every intelligent troll, there seems to be at least 50 moronic ones, hence my post.
As for the 'troll' & 'flamebait' monikers, alas there is no common standard definition for them. Besides, from what I've seen here, intelligent trolls are rarely moderated down anyway (I guess everyone is so tired of the dumb ones that we 'reward' the smart ones), so 'troll' & 'flamebait' are largely being used interchangeably (even though they shouldn't).
I Think the correct word would be more open, nvidia supports Linux reasonably well considering its marketshare, AMD/ATI just choose a more effective solution, by releasing specs they don't have to bother with supporting every OS on the planet, While it might take a bit more time for good drivers for all cards to appear for less used platforms atleast everyone has been given the tools needed to make it happen, Companies like Microsoft and Apple can even write their own drivers for old AMD/ATI hardware if it becomes necessary in the future.
So AMD/ATI isn't more Linux friendly, they're just more friendly towards everyone.
I still use nvidia though since they had the best proprietary Linux drivers when i last upgraded and the ATI opensource drivers weren't good enough for me.
They don't provide hardware accelerated 3D graphics last time I checked, which is a fairly major flaw if you ask me.
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Erm. They do. Just not on all chipsets yet, as I already said. When was the last time you checked? Last century?
Mart
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
AMD/ATI just choose a more effective solution, by releasing specs they don't have to bother with supporting every OS on the planet, While it might take a bit more time for good drivers for all cards to appear
Except releasing specs isn't the only thing they're doing. They've also got at least 3 of their own devs (AMD employees) working on the new driver stack. Once that new stack hits the mainstream, people's perceptions of AMD support for Linux are going to change dramatically (I'm using that new stack now).
so a more appropriate car analogy would be having a car with the drive belts missing. You can drive it around for a short period of time, but after that the engine gets very hot and the battery goes flat.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons