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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."
No it means that linux will ship with an open source alternative to the closed source Nvidia drivers.
Because Nouveau works on a more architectures than Windows has ever been ported to.
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 There are 5,000,000 outdated and spurious reports.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'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 :-)
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)
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?
DRM in this context means Direct Rendering Manager and not Digital Rights Management
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.
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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?
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.
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.
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.
For 3D. For 2D it's already better. Good 2D is underappreciated, but matters most for a lot of stuff that people casually use computers for.
Obviously, gamers care about 3D, but good 2D matters also more than you might know for gamers into 80s/90s emulation - it's quite disappointing that even today, emulators sometimes fail to reliably vsync, really doesn't recreate the classic experience of amiga or snes gaming if frame rates aren't a rock solid tear-free 60Hz (or 50Hz depending on territory).
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.
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.
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.
or 2D it's already better.
Do you have any benchmarks that aren't 2+ years old and were comparing nouveau to the ancient NV 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.
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.
Yes indeed. Years of dissing Windows for integrating the graphics drivers into the kernel, and what does Linux do ...
Reading Linus' remarks, I can't help but think what a childish, whinging prat he is. He makes Theo look calm, cool, and collected.
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.
Ok, I may be dating myself here, but way back in 2000 we were telling people in the Nvidia support channel that GLXGEARS IS NOT A BENCHMARK. Nvidia spent a LOT of time over the years putting absurd amounts of time into over-optimizing the performance of that small snippet of code, and a few others, simply because they noticed that certain clueless noobs were using it as a performance metric.
The ONLY purpose of glxgears as it was designed is to indicate if software or hardware acceleration of 3D was happening. It's now useless for that even, since CPUs have become fast enough to crank out absurd FPS numbers as well.
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
My Quadro based laptop with the NVidia driver has no issues with suspending and hibernating, and runs generally flawlessly.
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?)
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)
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.
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 I thought AMD/ATI opened up their specs? I know that here on /. we hear all the time "if they would only open up their specs we would take care of the rest". So shouldn't the ATI drivers for Linux be much better now? I know the Nvidia driver isn't "free as in freedom" and if AMD/ATI have fully opened up their specs shouldn't ATI be having the better experience in Linux now?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.