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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."
I don't know about you, but I've never paid for a driver in my life.
Sigh...
Gratis vs. Libre
Look it up.
Which is a distinction most people won't care about when their "gratis" driver can't properly play their 3d games.
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They only just updated the driver to support the new kernel interfaces, after the old ones they used were so outdated, that they were completely removed from the kernel!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.