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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 There are 5,000,000 outdated and spurious reports.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?
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 :-)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.