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."

Comments

How does it compare with the other NVidia drivers?

[Lord Lode]

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...?

What card to buy today?

[Just Some Guy]

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 There are 5,000,000 outdated and spurious reports.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.

This is great - sort of

[ClosedSource]

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?

Re:This is great - sort of

[RAMMS EIN]

``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.

Re:How does it compare with the other NVidia drive

[socrplayr813]

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.