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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."
Because Nouveau works on a more architectures than Windows has ever been ported to.
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.
Now if NVidia cards would work on those architectures, too :-)
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.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Most people don't care about /. either, and here we are.
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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?
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.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
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.
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.
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 other popular x86 or x64 operating system you use from implementing similar interfaces. Many of the functions would just need to be stubs that do nothing.
And "virtualization" does not mean what you think it means. There is absolutely no need to modify the machine code of the graphics drivers, let alone fake the hardware underneath it using software.
Any restrictions would likely be imposed by licensing and ideology, rather than any technical obstacles.
Please refrain from spouting out your pure bullshit in the future. Or at least try to write a Windows graphics driver before you pretend to know anything about them.
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.
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.
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?)
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.