Open Source 3D Nvidia Driver Is Ready For Fedora 13

An anonymous reader writes "Red Hat has already been using the Nouveau X.Org driver in Fedora for providing display and 2D support, but with their next release (Fedora 13) they will be making open-source 3D acceleration readily available to those using Nvidia graphics cards. Red Hat has packaged the Nouveau 3D driver in Fedora 13 and what makes it interesting — besides being an open source 3D driver that was written by the community by reverse engineering Nvidia's closed-source driver — is that it's one of the first drivers to use the Gallium3D driver interface. Phoronix has tested out this Gallium3D driver for Nvidia GPUs in a Fedora 13 daily build and found it to run with a variety of OpenGL games, with benchmarks being included that compare it to Nvidia's official driver. The performance is far from being on the same stage as Nvidia's official Unix driver."

Comments

How come?

[Anonymous Coward]

Question:

Why "performance is far from being on the same stage as NVIDIA's official Unix driver" ?

Re:How come?

[Anonymous Coward]

Step 1: Figure things out.
Step 2: Make them work (correctly)
Step 3: Make them work (fast)

its all a part of the process and step 2 is a HUGE achievement especially when most of the information about the chips was reverse engineered.

Re:How come?

[h4rr4r]

Because NVIDIA has access to the docs and these guys don't? It's hard work to reverse engineer a video card and build a driver.

Re:How come?

[mikael]

Reverse engineering of hardware interfaces involves running usb, i2c, pci monitoring software to watch to see what hardware memory and registers are being changed. From this, it is possible to write an equivalent driver.

Doesn't Nvidia do some memory mapping voodoo with virtual memory mapping to speed up context switching?

Re:How come?

[marcansoft]

Because they'd love to be able to work on improving the existing wheel instead, but, unfortunately, they can't.

Re:How come?

[h4rr4r]

Because the existing wheel is only a temporary wheel that will be taken away the minute NVIDIA wants to sell new cards.

I bet you already knew that though.

Re:How come?

[X0563511]

They are still early into Step 2. Checking the site and status details out, I can't understand how this is ready for Prime Time. Most cards don't work, many essential features are just plain not implemented...

Re:How come?

[Vaphell]

you have no guarantee that nvidia blob will support current cards in 2015, chances are that in such scenario users of older hardware will be forced to use open source drivers. Same thing with amd/ati - their drivers don't support older radeons, i am sure owners of such video adapters would love to get ANY 3d acceleration.

Re:How come?

[codepunk]

So I don't have to waste my time going and hunting down nvidia drivers when I install a new machine....that alone is a good enough reason.

Re:How come?

[postmortem]

Because they do some of stuff in software that card is actually able to accelerate in hardware?
Because unlike wifi and such cards which do most of calculations on host; here they need to make hardware 'do it'?
Because they don't know how to use architecture for which they don't have full specs or programming guides?

They are almost doing mission impossible. Many more man-hours are needed to reverse engineer proper ways to use the hardware. With so many millions of transistors on board, it does not sound promising.

Re:How come?

[nxtw]

you have no guarantee that nvidia blob will support current cards in 2015

Not a problem on operating system with stable driver ABIs.

Re:How come?

[rahvin112]

And what happens if tomorrow Nvidia decides it doesn't want to provide those drivers any more and removes all but the latest cards drivers? You can't distribute their binary drivers without their permission (and they don't give it btw). The problem with not using FOSS software is that if the commercial vendor decides to stop selling it there is nothing you can do about it other than offer them lots of money and hope they change their mind. Take windows XP, the day Microsoft decides to stop selling it you won't be able to purchase a new version of it (once existing stock already purchased is exhausted) and then your only option is to buy the newest version with X bad feature.

There is nothing at all stupid and irrational about being prepared for the inevitable with commercial software. Although there are likely very few people still using 3dfx cards you can't get drivers for them anymore. Companies go out of business, change management or simply decide it's in their interest to stop providing legacy drivers all the time. The past is no predictor of the future, as the first rule of stock investing applies almost universally and is "Past performance is not an indicator of future performance".

In fact assuming that nothing will ever change is actually the irrational, stupid and childish behavior.

Re:How come?

[Randle_Revar]

>I can't understand how this is ready for Prime Time

Because this is Fedora. New stuff always appears and/or is turned on by default in Fedora first:
Gallium3d
Radeon/RadeonHD
kms
btrfs
packagekit
consolekit
policykit
devicekit
empathy/telepathy

Also, I think some parts of the Gnome port to dbus appeared there well before they did in other distros

Re:How come?

[arose]

So haw many desktop operating systems support 10 year old binary drivers?

Re:How come?

[h4rr4r]

Unless a bug is found in the old driver, and now can't be fixed.

Which OS new is using 5 year old drivers, windows 7 does not like XP drivers.

Re:How come?

[nxtw]

So haw many desktop operating systems support 10 year old binary drivers?

As of today: just one! (Yesterday the answer would be none.)

Windows 7 still supports the driver interfaces that came with Windows 2000.

Re:How come?

[nxtw]

Which OS new is using 5 year old drivers, windows 7 does not like XP drivers.

Most Windows 2000/XP drivers work in Windows 7. This is how non-Aero capable graphics drivers work in Windows Vista and Windows 7; they use the same driver interface as in Windows XP.

Re:How come?

[norpy]

this is only half true.

64bit windows has deprecated a lot of the driver interfaces (out of necessity) so good luck getting your old hardware to work with 10 year old binary drivers.

Re:How come?

[nxtw]

64bit windows has deprecated a lot of the driver interfaces (out of necessity) so good luck getting your old hardware to work with 10 year old binary drivers.

If you need to use ten year old hardware, do you need to use x86-64?

With IOMMUs, you can just run a virtualized guest and pass the device to it - be it Windows 7 or something older. (Of course, you can still run recent software on 10 year old versions of Windows...)

Re:How come?

[h4rr4r]

HP windows drivers. They just killed a bunch of home printers by refusing to make drivers that scan or do any other "fancy" stuff for windows 7.

ATI does not support my backup laptop with their binary driver, the machine is about 8 years old.

Re:How come?

[h4rr4r]

Try that in Windows 7 64bit and get back to me.

That is the version all the OEMs are having pushed on them.

Re:How come?

[nxtw]

Try that in Windows 7 64bit and get back to me.

How many people need to use old hardware and x86-64?

That is the version all the OEMs are having pushed on them.

OEMs can install any OS version they like, as can users... especially the users who care about using five year old drivers.

Re:How come?

[arose]

In theory. In practice I've had Windows 2000 drivers fail on XP.

Re:How come?

[drinkypoo]

I can't understand how this is ready for Prime Time.

It isn't. Fedora is the beta test edition for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Fedora is not ready for prime time. Lots of people like to live on the bleeding edge, and that's OK, but Fedora is not the real thing. It's the sneak preview.

With that said, the news was not that they were going to make the nvidia driver fail, but that they would include the nouveau driver. So your comment is a total waste of space. HTH, HAND.

Re:How come?

[Chang]

Microsoft broke binary compatibility for many SCSI/HBA drivers between SP1 and SP2 for Windows 2003.

That was in a "stable" series.

Some people found this out the hard way when they saw the bluescreen at boot.

Re:How come?

[GigaplexNZ]

actually you can get copies of every MS product right back to DOS 3 via technet.

Technet is not a retail channel for typical consumers to get a single product. Also, the older products aren't supported and generally don't work on the new hardware around today.

because some FOSS project is FAR FAR more likely to stop producing updates and go offline (because they got a life/job/girlfriend) then a company like MS or nvidia which has actual funding

NVIDIA has already shown they are willing to drop driver support for their products when they aren't interested anymore. And it's not just about the risk of if they will stop support, you also need to factor in the damage done - we don't have the option to fix the proprietary stuff ourselves even if we wanted to, but we could fix the abandoned FOSS stuff if we considered it worthwhile.

so you'll need use a better example

So you'll need [to] use a better excuse.

Re:How come?

[GigaplexNZ]

If you need to use ten year old hardware, do you need to use x86-64?

If you are using something like the DEC Alpha or the early Itaniums, then you will need 64bit support (albeit not x86-64). Then again, you won't be running Windows 2000.

Re:How come?

[ZosX]

Not really. A lot of newer programs support only XP or newer, so you would have to at least upgrade to XP to get a lot of modern software to run. I'm pretty sure a lot of the major stuff still works, like firefox, and I can't think of any real examples, but there are certainly apps out there that need newer interfaces. I don't believe you can install the .net framework version 3 for instance and a lot of apps have been coded against those libraries. I don't know how much more life support XP has, but I think that within a couple more years the mainstream will have finally moved on to something more modern. I mean there are still windows 2000 holdouts, but the sun set on win2000 quite some time ago.

Re:How come?

[ZosX]

I have as well. Graphics drivers are not the greatest, for example, because XP brought DirectX 9. Finding binary drivers for ancient hardware can be quite a chore, especially with all the good driver repositories trying to nickel and dime you for some ancient S3 driver they still have sitting on there servers. Nothing is more supremely frustrating than really needing to complete an install and the only copies you can find still out there on the net are sitting behind some pay wall.

Re:How come?

[ZosX]

From what I've seen, it I've only seen Home Premium x86 on most new installs. Especially laptops. I don't see a big push for x64 unless I'm mistaken or something.

Re:How come?

[walshy007]

as a fedora user since the redhat days, I can honestly say one of the only retarded things they've done is replace pidgin with empathy, empathy is nowhere near as mature and feature complete and it was only even suggested because of the lack of webcam in pidgin which has now been resolved anyway.

Re:How come?

[walshy007]

With that said, the news was not that they were going to make the nvidia driver fail, but that they would include the nouveau driver.

fedora has had nouveau for at least two release cycles now (over a year) don't think you get just how bleeding edge it is (always works for me though at least), the news is that they are enabling 3d support as opposed to just 2d in the driver.

Re:How come?

[rahvin112]

actually you can get copies of every MS product right back to DOS 3 via technet.

Technet subscriptions allow for testing not use. Personal or commercial use (outside as I said testing) of MSDOS from technet is a violation of your license agreement with Microsoft. Not only that but you obviously don't have a technet subscription (I do) as you would know that MSDOS 6.22 is the only DOS available via technet, in addition windows 95 and 98 aren't available via technet. Regardless of being able to acquire it you can't legally run it unless you can purchase a retail used copy. Those sources rapidly dwindle. In fact many commercial software packages have completely disappeared and software drivers for newer versions of software like windows are frequently not available. HP and Creative are prime examples of companies that simply don't provide drivers and force you to purchase newer hardware. It's not unreasonable to assume that at some future date Nvidia may decide to do the same, in fact something as simple as a change in management could cause it.

your whole premise is a big fail, because some FOSS project is FAR FAR more likely to stop producing updates and go offline (because they got a life/job/girlfriend) then a company like MS or nvidia which has actual funding. I'll say it again, your assumption is stupid and irrational and you've got nothing to back it up.

Your belief and assertion that the Linux kernel (after all the entire article is about FOSS drivers for Nvidia cards for the Linux Kernel) is more likely to be abandoned than Nvidia's production of drivers for Legacy hardware is laughably stupid. Such a statement is the height of folly and irrationality and frankly makes you look like an idiot in need of professional help. The Linux Kernel is supported by far more companies with far more resources (apparently the basis of your argument) and in fact was developed even without those resources. It's use in everything from MP3 players to televisions to large mainframe computers and it's nearly 25% market share in all computers guarantees it will survive far longer than Nvidia ever will. Working to develop FOSS drivers for nVidia hardware so future Linux kernels can use such hardware is only logical.

There is no doubt in my mind that at some point in the future nvidia will abandon production of drivers for legacy hardware. It will likely come in a few short years as then current hardware begins to differ so substantially from the legacy hardware as to make driver production excessively costly. Up until the Fermi architecture, even 10 year old hardware still functioned substantially similar to legacy hardware. That advantage will fade very rapidly as the processors nvidia produces move towards general use and likely in a few short years they will abandon legacy hardware as driver production costs escalate. To do otherwise would likely elicit a shareholder lawsuit.

I don't expect any of this to convince you of course, in fact I expect a reply with more silly childish aggressiveness probably with some name calling. With that in mind lets deal with the only premise here is your original assertion and give you an avenue to everyone you know anything at all. You premise was that someone is irrational and stupid to believe that Nvidia could some day stop providing drivers. Rather than asking me to prove a negative why don't you simply present evidence that Nvidia drivers will always be available thereby proving your statement.

So have at it, prove that Nvidia will always provide drivers for every product they have ever made. While your at, show me where I can get (full) 3dfx drivers for windows 7, after all Nvidia owns 3dfx and 3dfx's former products are Nvidias products now. After you prove Nvidia will always produce legacy hardware drivers for the rest of eternity I will happily admit you are right and that there is nothing at all to worry about. Don't worry, I'm not holding my breath. Cheers!

Re:How come?

[Al Dimond]

There are lots of reasons to want good F/OSS graphics drivers. For example: the binary ATI graphics driver doesn't work with on kernels with the realtime-preempt patches, which seem to help JACK-related stuff considerably. I don't think Nvidia's binary drivers do either. F/OSS drivers can be a lot more flexible in this regard. Intel's graphics driver works, for example.

Re:How come?

[advocate_one]

So I don't have to waste my time going and hunting down nvidia drivers when I install a new machine....that alone is a good enough reason.

another is not getting hit by your card no longer supported when you've just done an upgrade so having to switch to the legacy drivers the hard way yet again... been hit by nvidea blob problems too often when upgrading.

Re:How come?

[Bert64]

I have a desktop with 8gb ram, and a dec tulip 10/100 network card (designed for use in 64bit alpha systems)...
Windows has no 64bit drivers for this card at all, and the 32bit version won't let me use all of the memory in the system.

Re:How come?

[vipw]

I think you are likely mistaken. I haven't seen any installations personally, but the Steam survey showed twice as many x86-64 installs than of Windows 7 than there were i386.

Of course, Steam is will have a severe sampling bias against laptops, so it's possible your observations fits the data. Here are the survey results: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Re:How come?

[Anonymous Coward]

actually you can get copies of every MS product right back to DOS 3 via technet

Attempt to get a copy of the MS JRE.

Re:How come?

[Anonymous Coward]

it's the same kind of thinking as people who stash guns in the attic and keep a hord of canned food for when jesus ends the world next week.

Insurance is the same kind of thinking as people who stash guns in the attic and keep a hord (sic) of canned food. The reason insurance is not a wacky/fringe thing is that bad shit actually happens. As for the GP, he (he != me) may have picked a bad example in the software giant which is running purely on legacy, but I quite literally have a drawer full of perfectly good hardware (NICs, webcams, scanners, PDAs, remotes, etc) that vomits all over your "proprietary companies rarely stop producing updates" theory. If the drivers were open source, I'd be able to patch them for current use (if someone else hadn't already) - I have sufficient coding skills (and as you can see, time to burn). And I'd put it on the internet (probably sourceforge), which tends to horde (that's how we spell that word, champ) things like this indefinitely. But to reverse engineer the gear? I don't know shit about reverse engineering, and it'd be way too much effort (and I'm guessing you need multiple copies of the product you're trying to reverse engineer). Much easier to just buy another one (ah, suddenly dropping support for old gear makes sense, doesn't it?).

Re:How come?

[Anonymous Coward]

Up until the Fermi architecture, even 10 year old hardware still functioned substantially similar to legacy hardware.

that is beyond absurd and shows how little you know about 3d hardware.

There is no doubt in my mind that at some point in the future nvidia will abandon production of drivers for legacy hardware

really? because they still support hardware from 10 years ago.

you know what isn't supported by ANYONE anymore? the linux kernel from 10 years ago.

Re:How come?

[Daengbo]

actually you can get copies of every MS product right back to DOS 3 via technet. so you'll need use a better example.

Try to get that DOS version to run on a modern SATA setup. No drivers? Really?

Re:How come?

[V!NCENT]

A few reasons:

1) nVidia's drivers are not implemented like standard X.org drivers: the binary drivers replace most stuff.

2) Not optimised yet.

3) It's a Gallium3D architecture driver, which is slower (for now) than classic Mesa.

Gallium3D is a new driver architecture where the driver itself is splitted into three parts:

1) The Kernel part. Providing memmorty management and kernels based modesetting instead of user mode setting. Every driver could use it so this part is not needed to be implemented into every driver out there to reduce the amount of coding work.

2) The Gallium3D itself, like this nVidia driver that only needs to expose the bare metal functionality of the graphics card in the form of an API.

3) Features (called State Trackers) like OpenGL, video acceleration, OpenCL, Direct3D, vector graphics acceleration, etc... This is also something that is the same for all Gallium3D driver supported graphics cards. This also doesn't need to be coded for every Gallium3D driven card like the nVidia cards. BTW these State Trackers are implemented on top of the 'standard' Gallium3D API that is surficed by this nVidia Nouveau driver...

So the speed of the nVidia cards when driven by this Gallium3D driver is not solely Nouveau's 'fault'. If the Linux kernel and the State Trackers speed up then the nVidia cards will also leverage more FPS.

These Gallium3D drivers are still young. The entire architecture has not long ago passed the state of rocket science. There is no real world experience and so the fact that the Nouveau developpers could reverse engineer, convert to Gallium3D and make a GeForce 9 run Quake 3 is a realy, realy big achievement.

Things will speed up soon and the future of graphic card driver is bright for Linux!

Re:How come?

[TheRaven64]

The binary nVidia drivers had a remotely exploitable kernel-privilege vulnerability that nVidia knew about for two years before fixing. When they did fix it, the fix was only for the latest revision of the driver, which didn't support all of the affected cards. Sure, you could run the old version, but then any web page you visited could inject arbitrary code into your kernel.

Now, remind me, what was your point?

Re:How come?

[ElusiveJoe]

Of essential and completely unimplemented features only Power Saving is left. Otherwise, it's fixing bugs, enhancing existing features and speeding up the driver.

Re:How come?

[laurelraven]

really? because they still support hardware from 10 years ago.

you know what isn't supported by ANYONE anymore? the linux kernel from 10 years ago.

Maybe not, but pretty much everything a 10 year old Linux kernel supported is STILL supported in the current kernel, which is actually a much more accurate comparison than what you are using. Kernel support is not the same as hardware support...in fact, it is the exact opposite, since it is what supports hardware. I dare you to find something outside the free software world that supports as much hardware as the Linux kernel...hell, there are things it supports that are in use by less than 0.003% of computers that Linus refuses to abandon support for. Try getting that sort of commitment from a commercial vendor.

Re:How come?

[DaVince21]

I'm not sure how true that is... ATI sure took away support for my card at some point, and not even all features worked before that (S-Video)...

I guess the argument is more about having a nice, open-source driver that anyone can work on and which has potential to actually become better than the prop driver at some point.

Re:How come?

[cynyr]

find me a xorg 7.4 diver for a geforce3? or for that matter that a 5000/6000 card?

Re:How come?

[3.1415926535]

False. The advisory that claimed that was mistaken because they didn't contact NVIDIA first and confused it with an earlier X server bug (which was also remotely exploitable, thank you very much). The actual problem only existed in two beta driver releases and never existed in the legacy drivers.

See the NVIDIA response for more details: http://nvidia.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/nvidia.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=1971

Re:How come?

[TemporalBeing]

Which OS new is using 5 year old drivers, windows 7 does not like XP drivers.

Most Windows 2000/XP drivers work in Windows 7. This is how non-Aero capable graphics drivers work in Windows Vista and Windows 7; they use the same driver interface as in Windows XP.

I'm pretty sure all Video and Sound drivers will from WinXP SP3 and earlier will not work with Windows Vista and later. Why? Because Microsoft redesigned those systems for Windows Vista - they now operate primarily in user-space, and Windows 7 uses the same architecture being based on the same kernel as Vista. (Yes, Microsoft is using a similar architecture now to X for the Video Drivers.)

Re:How come?

[nxtw]

I'm pretty sure all Video and Sound drivers will from WinXP SP3 and earlier will not work with Windows Vista and later.

No. XPDM (Windows XP Driver Model) graphics drivers work on Vista and 7. This is how non-Aero capable graphics cards work on NT6 (such as the Intel GMA 900 and virtual graphics devices other than the latest VMware and Parallels versions). The same is true for audio. The old driver interfaces are still present, but you don't get the new features.

Re:How come?

[ebuck]

Blame the Gnome guys. Fedora picks up the Gnome desktop from Gnome, and they're the ones that decide the "default" IM manager had to change.

Re:How come?

[TemporalBeing]

Then they have a compatibility set somehow as the older drivers would not be able to operate in Kernel Mode as they would expect, which was part of XPDM. The Win2k driver model won't work, nor will NT4's. So the point still stands.

Re:How come?

[nxtw]

Then they have a compatibility set somehow as the older drivers would not be able to operate in Kernel Mode as they would expect, which was part of XPDM. The Win2k driver model won't work, nor will NT4's. So the point still stands.

The Windows XP Display Driver Model (XPDM) is the display driver model used in the Windows XP and Windows 2000 operating systems.

Re:How come?

[kd5zex]

stash guns in the attic and keep a hord of canned food

Yeah, that's totally stupid and irrational.

Benchmarks

[revengebomber]

I know it's not a professional project, nor built on any real technical documentation, but I hardly think that an OS should be distributed with a driver that gets 32fps running Quake 3 on a Geforce 9. Can anyone tell me: better or worse performance than using a 3dfx card under Linux?

Re:Benchmarks

[Hatta]

If you have to choose between shipping an open source driver that only does 2d, and an open source driver that does 2d well and 3d poorly which would you choose? People still have the choice to install the official Nvidia driver that they've always had. So this is a good step forward. If it's enough for Compiz, and can do kernel mode setting (which Nvidia's driver won't do), then it'll please a lot of people.

Re:Benchmarks

[serviscope_minor]

So? The NVidia driver doesn't support xrandr. I know it's only a professional project, but I hardly thing that a company should distribute a driver which can't even change screen resolution using the standard tools.

Re:Benchmarks

[Mad Merlin]

Would you prefer 0 fps?

Re:Benchmarks

[Mad Merlin]

The binary blob supports xrandr, but not xrandr 1.2. xrandr 1.2 adds a lot of nifty things like on the fly display rotation, but I can't say I've ever actually used any of them.

Re:Benchmarks

[Hatta]

I use xrandr to change the resolution of my GTS 250 all the time.

Re:Benchmarks

[lougarou]

# wtf? with the binary blob:
here$ cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Section "Device"
        Identifier "nVidia Corporation GeForce 8600 GTS rev 161"
        Driver "nvidia"
        BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
                Option "RandRRotation" "on"
EndSection
here$ xrandr -o 1
(turns his head to the right)

Re:Benchmarks

[Anonymous Coward]

I am one of those people and I'm very pleased with nouveau. I don't run games on linux very much (outside of teg and dosbox) but I would like KMS and a bling desktop. I get both of these on my 8800gt with a free driver which is now just a kernel option away! Nouveau FTW!

Re:Benchmarks

[drinkypoo]

So? The NVidia driver doesn't support xrandr.

False. It doesn't support KMS (Kernel Mode Setting) so you have to set the video mode after the kernel has posted. Meaning you don't get a seamless boot display, boo hoo. I have a GTS 240 which AFAIK is not supported by any driver (that may have changed in the last five weeks, where I've not been at that computer, because I've not been in that country) and xrandr works fine on it with the driver I'm using.

Now on the other hand, xrandr isn't working on my EEE 701 with Jolicloud Linux (aka a somewhat fucked-over Ubuntu Jaunty) with intel GMA 950 graphics. But you can get mode setting with the current intel driver, so I guess I'm going to reload this machine when I get home.

Re:Benchmarks

[timmarhy]

I know your not a professional, but i hardly thing you should be making this post without checking your facts.

Re:Benchmarks

[Funnnny]

Congratz, you just bought a car and ran it at 30km/h.
Get a driver license and do a 100km/h please

Re:Benchmarks

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft doesn't ship with any drivers they created with GForce9 cards. Should they stop shipping today, or should they recall (like Toyota) all the software they made and dont' ship again till all the problems are fixed? Why do people assume that microsoft makes all the software they make (instead of getting all their software made by other people). We won't even start to talk about reverse engineering and an utter derth of technical documentation. You reverse something as technical as a whole family of accelerated graphics cards, and then we will poke at you and ask pointed 'what the hell is wrong with you' questions.

Re:Benchmarks

[GigaplexNZ]

It's illegal to drive even at 30km/h without a license...

Re:Benchmarks

[ZosX]

Congratz, you just bought a car and ran it at 30km/h.

Get a driver license and do a 100km/h please

Have you considered that the parent might also dual boot into windows? Notice the gp states "I don't play games on linux much." (emphasis mine)

From what I've seen the nvidia drivers on linux can be pretty abysmal and even just getting compiz working is a huge step forward, especially for open source, reverse engineered drivers.

If you want to be a douche bag, at least read the parent's comment before being so quick to fire such a moronic reply. Is that all you can bring to the table? An insult? Because they stated that their graphics driver served their very limited needs? To use your fucking totally shitty analogy: If you are only ever city driving, you only really need to do 30 km/h anyways. Most people's cars will go well over 100. You are totally right. They are wasting all of that vast, untapped potential! I can get people not reading the article (fuck I didn't even RTFA and here I am making some comment!), but when you can't even read the whole comment you are taking the time to reply to, then maybe you need to go over to like digg or 4chan or something. Who knows, you might find some people more on your level there, if you know what I mean. You should learn some proper grammar too.

Re:Benchmarks

[ZosX]

What's up with this thread? The most insightful posts are coming from ACs.

Re:Benchmarks

[visualight]

xrandr works fine on it with the driver I'm using.

False. You can't use xrandr to enable/disable/setup multiple screens, so it does not work fine.

Re:Benchmarks

[i.r.id10t]

Didn't have it for Quake3, but for Quake2 my old Voodoo3-2000 card (AGP, 16mb ram) I was getting arond 90fps ... this was in '98 and '99...

Re:Benchmarks

[Anonymous Coward]

The official nVidia drivers work fine. I've never had a single issue and it's performance is fast all across the board. I use an 8600GT.

What are these imaginary "problems" the proprietary driver has? No one has ever said. I think it's just FOSS purists being jackasses that don't like the idea of something proprietary running on Linux.

The official driver does EVERYTHING better than both nv and Nouveau. And frankly, I think very few people would trade reliability and performance just for an unimportant feature like KMS. Sure, would be nice to run X without suid root, but not if it means your desktop is slow performing.

Nouveau's performance is abysmal. I'd MAYBE use it on something lightwieght like lxde, fluxbox, or openbox. But for KDE or GNOME? I want to get performance out of their window managers, which are compositors, not stackers. They need a good video driver.

Nouveau is making progress, but I have yet to see it stack up against nVidia's own driver.

Quick Questions

[Monkeedude1212]

Suppose I wanted to get into writing drivers -

1) What are the things I'd need to know? Languages, Theory, Techniques

2) What are the things I'd require? Testing environment, IDE if applicable, Development kits, etc

3) Any Reading material? A beginners guide, reference material, that kind of stuff.

Re:Quick Questions

[mrphoton]

clearly your post was a joke, but a serious answer to your question would be Linux Device Drivers: http://lwn.net/Kernel/LDD3/ Understanding the linux kernel: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596000028 I found both books fantastic and well worth a read, they will take you from knowing C to developing drivers for the linux kernel.

Re:Quick Questions

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Copy the Ethernet driver code, and use it as a base.

Seriously, that's what the folks told me before I wrote a device driver for an ATM network adapter.

Don't even look at the Token Ring driver code, I was told.

I could imagine the same holds for writing graphics card device drivers.

That glass of Sake, and a talk from your manager about the Divine Wind will be all that you need to set off about your task.

Oh, and the headband with the red dot.

Re:Quick Questions

[DeadCatX2]

Copy the Ethernet driver code, and use it as a base.

Nonono. You're supposed to use the Toaster sample as a base.

Re:Quick Questions

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me guess. The naiveté of the quest to program device drivers will lead one to crash and burn with spectacular resaults. Am I right?

Re:Quick Questions

[selven]

Don't even look at the Tolkien Ring driver code, I was told.

Sage advice...

Re:Quick Questions

[arielCo]

clearly your post was a joke

Not necessarily. Ever said "when I grow up I wanna..." without a clue as to what it would take? You still have that option as a grownup, with perhaps a better chance of making it since you make your own decisions :)

Re:Quick Questions

[naz404]

Now that's what I'm tolkien about!

Re:Quick Questions

[Ruie]

Writing graphics card drivers is a way to get closer to the hardware. They have many interesting gadgets (like PLLs) that give a taste of interfacing with a real world.

For 3d drivers, I recommend reading a book on OpenGL, downloading Noveau code and reading it. Lurk on the mailing list for a few weeks and then ask developers for a simple task to help with. Test with your applications and report bugs with as much information as possible. Try fixing the bugs yourself.

Re:Quick Questions

[Anonymous Coward]

I started out with this:

#include
#include
int main(void)
{
printf("Hello World\n");
}

But, you know, go with that red dot thing if it works for you. Come back and tell us how it worked out for you.....oh wait!

Re:Quick Questions

[MostAwesomeDude]

1) C. You should also be familiar with compiler theory, data structures, bus layouts, and all the various arcane weirdness around arches, especially x86.

2) Nothing special. Most of the programs we use for testing are games, since they have the best stress tests and because we target real use-cases. The exception is piglit, which is a conformance test.

3) The code. AMD and Intel have released some docs, but frankly, you will need to read the code.

Good luck. This is tough stuff.

Re:Quick Questions

[mikael]

Uh, the device driver is supposed to act as the implementation between the interface of the hardware and the interface of the data communication layer. Any software layers above aren't supposed to see any difference between a ATM network and an Ethernet or Token Ring network. All they need to know is the function calls to send a block of data to a specified network address, read back blocks of data representing addressed data packets, set various settings and read back statistics.

Re:Quick Questions

[squizzar]

Also probably worth a read is some operating system design stuff. I'm not sure how much of it is covered in the suggested books (they're both on my reading list) so it might be redundant, but driver land is full of things like synchronization (semaphores/mutexes/locks etc), memory management issues (depending on the interrupt level you may not be able to access data on other memory pages because you are at a higher level of priority than the VMM), interrupts and interrupt levels etc. etc.

Thinking about it, the books would be remiss to not explain a lot of these things (and also how they are implemented in Linux). For my sins I've done more windows driver development than linux (and the WDF is actually pretty damned smart and well designed, which is a pleasant surprise), so I know more of the Windows context than Linux, but having an understanding of the overall concepts and reasons for the mechanisms of OS Kernels is very useful, and will help you make better design decisions. You can buy a book, or have a look around the web since a lot of universities seem to leave their courses out in the open - some intentionally - for an operating systems design or similar course.

Re:Quick Questions

[Tolkien]

My eyes are burning!

Wow, it's like the infancy of civilization.

[Singularity42]

I remember at Intel those silly locked up books detailing the trade secrets. We have constrained bits flying through constrained hardware to make a game. Anyone looking in from the outside will wonder what game we are all playing for this state of affairs!

I don't think we'll get either religion or IP out of the way before the Singularity hits anyway.

Re:Wow, it's like the infancy of civilization.

[BitHive]

hahahah the singularity hahahahahahha

A better question

[ElusiveJoe]

Is it better than using a software 3D stack? Because I have a feeling that nothing is really accelerated.

Factually incorrect troll is factually WRONG.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Just for fun:

Take a look on "Configure Konqueror" option in Konqueror-the default browser for KDE. All those options and not a single NoScript or AdBlock, the shit that counts.

Konqueror comes, out of the box, with an adblocker which is compatible with (and defaults to) AdBlockPlus' list.

The rest of it is a matter of mostly uninformed opinion, like this:

As most of you know KDE uses both Konqueror and Dolphin for file navigation.

Konqueror is a web browser, it just happens to support Dolphin as a plugin. So nope, no change here. It's other browsers, like Firefox, which insist on making local file browsing look like an autogenerated Apache index.

In Konqueror if you save password for some website, this 'wallet' password pops up and in order to save the password you have to type another password in the wallet.

Yes, once per session. Gnome has an equivalent wallet, and you're not required to have a password for it. It's just helpful if you do -- it's this neat little feature called "encryption". Hell, even Firefox supports a Master Password.

Not really worth going into detail about how wrong you are, since you're already pretty much a troll, but really, you can do better. There are enough things to dislike about KDE that you could effectively troll it without spreading things which are actually wrong.

Re:Factually incorrect troll is factually WRONG.

[GigaplexNZ]

As most of you know KDE uses both Konqueror and Dolphin for file navigation.

Konqueror is a web browser, it just happens to support Dolphin as a plugin. So nope, no change here. It's other browsers, like Firefox, which insist on making local file browsing look like an autogenerated Apache index.

To be fair to the troll, this wasn't always the case. Konqueror was a web browser and file browser, then Dolphin came along later causing some overlap. This overlap has now been mostly resolved.

Re:Factually incorrect troll is factually WRONG.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Konqueror was a web browser and file browser, then Dolphin came along later causing some overlap. This overlap has now been mostly resolved.

Nope, Dolphin is and always was (since 4.0 at least, IIRC) a file manager which used the same component to actually draw the files and folders that Konqueror does. The only "resolution" is that people are starting to realize this.

To say that Konqueror "overlaps" with Dolphin makes about as much sense as saying it "overlaps" with Okular, just because Konqueror can display PDFs... which it does using components form Okular.

And I'm pretty sure Konqueror still has all the same file management features it used to, also -- it's just that the only ones that aren't shared with Dolphin are things which also happen to be useful for Web browsing, like the up arrow.

But I haven't used either extensively lately, so correct me if I'm wrong...

Re:Factually incorrect troll is factually WRONG.

[GigaplexNZ]

I was thinking more from the late stages of KDE 3 series. Konqueror was the default file browser, Dolphin was just another option to try (and introduced late in the game) if you wanted a lighter weight one. Now that Dolphin is more usable and is the default in KDE 4, Konqueror doesn't tend to "invade Dolphins territory" even though it is technically capable of it. That's the gist I was trying to get at.

Re:Factually incorrect troll is factually WRONG.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Ah, I see. I didn't realize Dolphin existed pre-KDE4.

Hurray!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now those of us who still have a fetish for pixelated porn from the dial-up ages can watch pixelated porn in 3D!

You game on Fedora?

[hatemonger]

As a PC owner with a polarized projector setup, I'm mush more interested in ATI's Catalyst 10.3 coming out in March that will have 3D support in the stereoscopic sense. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/catalyst-eyefinity-radeon,2559-2.html (Yes, I know it's offtopic. It still makes me giddy and I don't have anyone else to tell.)

Re:You game on Fedora?

[pklinken]

On that note, I am expecting my new 23" IPS screen to be delivered tomorrow.
It will hopefully be an improvement over my current 17" CRT.
(Yes, I know it's offtopic, but it makes me giddy and i also don't have anyone else to tell.)

Re:Quick Questions - Amiga?

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't think the 3d graphics accelerator for the Amiga had drivers...

I know it doesn't fit right but...

[Anonymous Coward]

...what the f&(£ is wrong with the one that selected the quotes to be put at the end of the page?

"It's today!" said Piglet. "My favorite day," said Pooh.

Oh god. Captcha: forest. FML. I think I'm gonna go drown myself in a pot of honey. Thx CowboyNeal.

What?

[uvajed_ekil]

The performance is far from being on the same stage as Nvidia's official Unix driver.

Excuse me for not being an expert on drivers for hardware I don't own, but does this mean the new driver is better than the official driver, or not nearly as good? If it is not "on the same stage," meaning not nearly as good, why is Red Hat using it, and why is this news? Do some people really use markedly inferior software simply because it is open source, even if a better competitor is available at no cost? This seems silly to me. I use linux because it works perfectly well for me. If it were a pile of crap in comparison to Windows, I'd use Windows (I can get that for free too, so there is no effective cost difference), even though I have a casual dislike for Microsoft. (please no Macintosh osx comments here, I don't care)

Re:What?

[h4rr4r]

Yes, people do and freedom is not seen as silly by all people.

When NVIDIA drops support for these cards people will use this driver or go without.

Re:What?

[Paradigm_Complex]

Do some people really use markedly inferior software simply because it is open source, even if a better competitor is available at no cost?

Nvidia's driver may not necessarily be "better," depending on how you define it. Nvidia's driver is clearly better in terms of 3D acceleration, but Nouveau wins in many other areas (largely as an extension of it's F/OSS'ness). There's much less legal worry when distributing it, it doesn't have to be recompiled against the kernel updates, it supports KMS (which is more important than 3D acceleration with many, such as myself), it can be fix/changed/updated without dependence on Nvidia, it's also more likely to have continued support on older hardware - the list gets pretty long. Maybe these things don't matter to you as much as 3D acceleration, but for many they do.

I use linux because it works perfectly well for me.

F/OSS isn't just blind idealism - there's practical benefits which result. I expect at least part of the reason why Linux "works perfectly well" for you is a result of the fact it's F/OSS. This carries over to the video drivers, too.

Re:What?

[drinkypoo]

Excuse me for not being an expert on drivers for hardware I don't own,

You're excused.

but does this mean the new driver is better than the official driver, or not nearly as good?

It's not new, it's been around for a while. But it's not nearly as good in most respects; no VDPAU, poor performance.

If it is not "on the same stage," meaning not nearly as good, why is Red Hat using it,

Because it is freely redistributable.

and why is this news?

Because it just happened.

Do some people really use markedly inferior software simply because it is open source, even if a better competitor is available at no cost?

No, some people use markedly inferior software simply because it is Free Software, which is totally and completely different (The OSI's attempts to convince you to the contrary notwithstanding.)

This seems silly to me.

Nobody cares.

I use linux because it works perfectly well for me.

Me too. But nobody cares why either of us use Linux. Well, that's not true. I've put some people on to it. Nobody cares why you use Linux.

If it were a pile of crap in comparison to Windows, I'd use Windows

In many respects, it is, for example if you are a gamer.

even though I have a casual dislike for Microsoft.

So you're wearing slacks?

(please no Macintosh osx comments here, I don't care)

Nobody cares if you care, didn't we cover that?

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

I imagine it will work as well as all those OTHER "free" accelerated drivers for Linux, meaning the performance will be shite and it will hang up and crash the system frequently (not to mention being severely lacking in features and buggy as hell).

I'm sticking with NVIDIA's code. It's good enough for me and I don't give a shit about dogma. I remember the last great dogmatic "victory" Redhat was waving around called "GNOME". That was a fun crash-fest too. Say, what ever happened to their sycophantic "RMS Linux" distro?

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes using the opensource drivers have serious benefits, such as stability. The nvidia drivers never really caused me much trouble, but this is highlighted by fglrx v. radeon. Radeon is as solid as a rock for me, while fglrx will cause random kernel panics (not common, but 0 panics v. 5/panics a month is annoying). fglrx is much better at 3d, but at 2d it is worse than radeon.

Re:What?

[BESTouff]

Do some people really use markedly inferior software simply because it is open source, even if a better competitor is available at no cost?

The NVIDIA driver has a huge cost: you know the day NVIDIA wants your card to be obsolete and replaced, they'll stop shipping the driver. They did it in the past and will continue to do it because they think it makes them more profitable. Plus, you don't know what's in their driver, no one can make it work with your custom kernel if there's a problem.

Only if your don't value your freedom, the NVIDIA driver has no cost (but then you're better with MacOS or Windows).

Re:What?

[maxwell demon]

Huh? I'm using Gnome all the time, and I cannot remember it crashing a single time.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

And we won't talk about the usual development curve in OSS.

Software gets better in direct proportion of the people using it. Today it is experimental, when millions of people start using it, a percentage of them will turn to be helping developers. Something like 60% of ubuntu bugs are from the graphic cards, until now, they couldn't do anything about it.

And there will be a lot of companies(that are not NVIDIA) that need improved drivers too.

So that are fantastic news!!

Re:What?

[Just Some Guy]

it supports KMS (which is more important than 3D acceleration with many, such as myself)

Off-topic, but: why is KMS more important? Not (to my knowledge) being affected by any of the problems that it solves, I never understood why it was all that special. What does it do for you?

Re:What?

[migla]

Here's the deal:

Free software is about giving people freedom. Proprietary software is about denying people freedom. Are you for or against freedom?

(disclaimer: I have proprietary drivers in use, so I suck satans cock to some extent too, figuratively speaking, but that doesn't change the above stated.)

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is there a legal worry about distributing the nVidia driver? Section 2.1.2 of the nVidia license, people. READ it. It pretty much clears up any doubt about it's redistribution when it comes to Linux.

Re:Quick Questions - Amiga?

[DeadCatX2]

*whoosh*

Toaster is the classic sample code used when learning the Windows Driver Model (WDM). The vast majority of Windows drivers were probably built on top of the Toaster sample. My comment is supposed to be silly because you can't use a WDM in Linux.

I think he'd prefer the binary nVidia driver

[Sycraft-fu]

Remember that not everyone has an "OSS at any cost!" mentality. Some people use Linux for pragmatic reasons, not for ideological ones.

Re:I think he'd prefer the binary nVidia driver

[X0563511]

Then they are welcome to continue using whatever they want. But fuck anyone who thinks they have the right to determine if someone's work is a waste of time or not.

Re:I think he'd prefer the binary nVidia driver

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent post was a waste of time. That time could have been better spent on something else. Dang - this post is a waste of time too...

Re:I think he'd prefer the binary nVidia driver

[oatworm]

ut fuck anyone who thinks they have the right to determine if someone's work is a waste of time or not.

People determine that all the time. It's why some people get hired and some people get fired. It's why some people shop at Walmart and others don't. It's why some people buy Toyotas and others ride the bus... and so on. With that in mind, I don't recommend fucking everyone that participates in a market economy - you just don't know where some of them have been.

As for the whole Nouveau vs. closed source blob situation, I think Nouveau is a decent starting option for a distribution since it's something they have some control over. As others have pointed out, those that need official Nvidia drivers know where to look.

Re:I think he'd prefer the binary nVidia driver

[Anonymous Coward]

It wasn't a waste of time from the military industrial complex's point of view.... or the religious right's point of view... or any number of special interests' points of view. And I'm pretty sure it wasn't a waste of time from _his_ point of view.

Re:I think he'd prefer the binary nVidia driver

[armanox]

which Fedora is unable to distribute.

Re:I think he'd prefer the binary nVidia driver

[Anonymous Coward]

In some situations you aren't *allowed* to run proprietary software. This isn't Linux/OSS fanboyism but mere reality: the only way you can keep 100% control of what your system does is by using 100% open source software, or closed software you have the sources at disposal (and can rebuild it at any moment).

Re:I think he'd prefer the binary nVidia driver

[MostAwesomeDude]

Bush is definitely a waste of time. One of the worst bands I've ever heard.

Re:I think he'd prefer the binary nVidia driver

[Anonymous Coward]

That song about cigarettes was pretty good...

Re:I think he'd prefer the binary nVidia driver

[ZosX]

I don't fuck whores as a general rule. Nothing personal.

Re:I think he'd prefer the binary nVidia driver

[Citizen of Earth]

Reminds me of a news story that came out when Robert Goddard was testing his early liquid-fuel rockets. He told an ass-hat reporter that rockets like his would one day reach the moon and the headline the next day after an unsuccessful test was "Goddard misses moon by only 250,000 miles".

Re:I think he'd prefer the binary nVidia driver

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the impression that OSS evolution is influenced by both "OSS at any cost!" and "pragmatic" forces. In fact, these two constantly compete at different scenarios. At the end of the process in most(*) of cases OSS gets to "OSS just works fine!".

(*) Here there are different opinions about the quality of the certain case.

Re:I think he'd prefer the binary nVidia driver

[Sycraft-fu]

I don't think he was saying the driver was a waste of time, I think he was saying that it was a waste to distribute it with Fedora right now.

I mean I don't think Firefox was a waste of time, I use it currently, in fact. However I think it would have been a waste to ship a 0.1 version with an OS that didn't work as well as other browser choices.

Re:I think he'd prefer the binary nVidia driver

[Anonymous Coward]

which is a bit like using a vegetarian OS and adding your own bacon sprinkles. You are spoiling the point of the OS by adding crap like that.

Re:I think he'd prefer the binary nVidia driver

[Hurricane78]

Hey! I don’t like Bush!

I like ’em Shaved! ^^

Re:I think he'd prefer the binary nVidia driver

[X0563511]

Bend over... :P

Re:I think he'd prefer the binary nVidia driver

[Just Some Guy]

Remember that not everyone has an "OSS at any cost!" mentality. Some people use Linux for pragmatic reasons, not for ideological ones.

You're exactly correct. I won't use closed software unless absolutely unavoidable because it's the least pragmatic solution. When you don't "own" the code running on your system, you're at the mercy of someone else.

I had a FreeBSD desktop with a GeForce 4 AGP card. Just before the buffer overflow vulnerability was found that made it possible to crack a display using the closed NVidia drivers just by displaying an appropriately-formatted image, NVidia dropped support for the GeForce 4 series from their new drivers. They also announced that the vulnerability was fixed in the new drivers but that the old ones were EOLed and unsupported. The old drivers didn't support the currently released version of FreeBSD that I was using, and the new ones didn't support my graphics card. Furthermore, I couldn't find a new AGP card that would work on the motherboard I had at the time, and the rest of my hardware was a couple of years behind the then-modern stuff on Newegg.

In my opinion, having to choose between living with a known vulnerability that actually affects you and paying to replace your entire system, from graphics card to motherboard to CPU to RAM, is pretty freaking impractical. I would've been happy to have the option of switching to a working FOSS driver, even if the performance was a third of the closed driver's.

Re:I think he'd prefer the binary nVidia driver

[Anonymous Coward]

THANK you. I think that's the real peason the people who don't like the nVidia driver don't like it: The driver works fine and performs well, they just don't like the fact its a binary blob.

Maybe they should just go waste time with Hurd or gNewSense or anything else crippled because of politics disguised as idealism.

Re:I think he'd prefer the binary nVidia driver

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh come on. Do some research. The nVidia license actually has a free-redistribution clause to it. The only condition being it can only be freely distributed with BSD or Linux.

There's no actual licensing issue stopping ANY Linux distribution from actually shipping with this driver preinstalled, except irrational fear of binary blobs.

Just in case you don'e believe me, here I am going to actually quote the clause. If you have the driver installed, and you use Arch, you can find it at /usr/share/licenses/nvidia/

"2.1.2 Linux/FreeBSD Exception. Notwithstanding the foregoing terms of Section 2.1.1, SOFTWARE designed exclusively for use on the Linux or FreeBSD operating systems, or other operating systems derived from the source code to these operating systems, may be copied and redistributed, provided that the binary files thereof are not modified in any way except for unzipping of compressed files)."

Section 2.1.1 being a restriction of the copy limitations of the nVidia driver, in particular, you are allowed only one backup copy of the software and can't give it to anyone. 2.1.2 holds up its hand and says, "BUT... if you use Linux, FreeBSD, or a fork of Linux or BSD, you can copy it all you want, just don't change it."

If any jackass tells you that the nVidia driver can't be preinstalled, he's either misinformed or FUDing.

Re:I think he'd prefer the binary nVidia driver

[Anonymous Coward]

Except most Linux users don't use Linux because it's a libre OS. They use Linux because it works well and kicks ass, and usually doesn't cost them any monetary value.

No one who eats a vegetarian meal is required to be a vegetarian. And if the bacon (Proprietary drivers.) actually makes the salad (OS) taste better (Work better.) than without the sprinkles (Proprietary drivers.) then so be it.

That's a very vegan (Stallmanist) point of view you have.

I use proprietary stuff on Linux because their open source alternatives are crappy and insufficient for actual practical value. Ideals are nice, but you can't compute with them, ideals don't have 3d acceleration support or play videos on the web.

I use FOSS because I notice significant quality upturns in most cases. In those cases where I find that the proprietary alternative is the best option, I use it and not think twice about it, since there really is no real moral issue about the software you use unless you pirate the software. Just because Richard Stallman goes around the world claiming it is immoral doesn't make it so.

A lot of people say that the fragmentation of Linux or it's almost non-commercial nature are the reason it's not taking the desktop as well as it could. I think it's the noisy, whiny, annoying, irritating, and counterproductive "FOSS or you're evil" minority in the Linux community scaring away developers and users alike.

Let me give you a hint: Just because it uses the GPL doesn't mean it's goals are to champion the politics of the GPL. Linus has said many things that pretty well prove he could actually care less about the "freeness" of software.

If you really think many people really want to run a 100% free distribution, run gNewSense for a week. Notice how horrendously useless and crippled it actually is. Now runa distribution made by a company that cares less about politics, and a lot more about practicality. THEY release the best distros because they'll provide (If the license permits.) binary blobs that actually make your hardware WORK.

Nouveau is nice, but not as nice as the official driver.

Re:mod 0p

[X0563511]

Friends don't let friends release bots drunk.

Xbox support?

[drinkypoo]

Does Nouveau support the graphics chip in the Xbox yet? I'd really love to be able to run XBMC on Linux on Xbox rather than running it on the Xbox OS on the Xbox.

Awesome

[quantaman]

I'm actually pretty impressed, I didn't expect they'd be this successful getting a development community and a working driver going. I'm curious as to the stability, I noticed there was one issue with the fonts in the review. Personally stability would be the big selling point for me, I've had issues with the proprietary drivers in the past and it would be great if there was a highly dependable open source driver I could count on.

On a related topic does anyone know the state of the open source ATI driver? I saw a phoronix article claiming it was more popular than the proprietary one but other than that I don't know what it has for performance or features. It would be interesting to compare since the ATI made the specs available.

Re:Awesome

[Yaa 101]

It depends on what ATI card you have, recently I bought a motherboard (ASUS M4A78-EM - Phenom II) with an integrated HR3200, I can tell you that all 3 ATI drivers perform bad.
The driver that runs best (better said least bad) on it is the 2D only ATI driver, the RadeonHD driver does not run at all and the FireGL (proprietary) crashes all the time and does not run 3D either.
I had to get my old Nvidea 6600 out of the closet (with which I did not yet try Nouveau), it does run 3D and GL without any trouble and rock solid on Nvidea's proprietary driver.

I hope at some point of course to take that card out again and being able to run proper ATI drivers, but at this point it's still an illusion for me.

Re:Awesome

[Just Some Guy]

On a related topic does anyone know the state of the open source ATI driver?

As of about a week ago, FreeBSD imported versions of Mesa3D, libdrm, and RadeonHD drivers recent enough to enable 3D on my Radeon 3600. This is on a work desktop so I haven't tried many games on it, but KDE's compositing works perfectly for me as of today. I can only assume it would work as well on Linux.

The official Nvidia driver crashes my laptop

[flyingfsck]

Soooo, I don't care if the Free driver is slower. I'd be happy if it works and doesn't crash. Presently I'm forced to use the VESA driver.

Re:The official Nvidia driver crashes my laptop

[daid303]

VESA? There is also the open source "nv" driver, which does 2D fine.

Re:The official Nvidia driver crashes my laptop

[dweezil-n0xad]

On my laptop I had to disable dynamic clocking in my nvidia driver config to get a working driver.
Add this to your nvidia modprobe options in /etc/modprobe.d/:
options nvidia NVreg_RegistryDwords="PerfLevelSrc=0x2222"

Many people have this problem with the official nvidia driver.

Re:KDE Sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

K3B looks like it was patterned after roxio easy CD creator. Which I suspect it may in fact have been. Except that easy cd creator wasn't owned by roxio yet at the time they started the project.

Comparing it to say, brasero, and there's really no contest: if you need to do anything other than "burn this heap of files onto a disk" then brasero ain't your man. k3b puts most of the cdrecord options into convenient menus with sane defaults. but cdrecord has a *lot* of options.

Tegra support?

[ChunderDownunder]

With multi-core ARM SoC chips on the horizon, have we FOSS drivers for X?

Were nvidia to use similar interfaces to their desktop cousins, they could steal the jump on the competition via nouveau.

Re:mod 0p

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm interested in this bot. It seems to be using markov chains to generate speech (I deduce this because each word belongs with it's neighbours, but words next-to-each-other-but-one don't flow at all; somewhat like someone with thought disorder), coupled with some kind of popularity-contest for weighting words (in particular, the nouns seem to have a distinct slashdot 'odour' to them). What I can't figure out is how posting it here of all places helps (why go to all the trouble to write a bot that can only post once every 10 minutes, and immediately gets buried with -1 Offtopic), and why it doesn't have basic word structure heuristics (words with numbers in them? What the fuck? Slashdot doesn't have a word blacklist that bots need to skirt around, does it?).

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Nvidia are older than 10 years

[Anonymous Coward]

Nvidia are older than 10 years. Fuckwit.

support costs

[Chris Snook]

Yes, reverse-engineering a driver *is* expensive, but when you compare it to the man-years of labor Red Hat has spent due to the binary blob writing random crap all over physical memory causing weird crashes, or merely investigating the possibility of the binary blob writing random crap all over physical memory for any given crash, it suddenly makes a lot of sense. Sure, the Nvidia driver is fast, but it's written with the philosophy that it's more important to be fast than correct, to the point where they actually patent their bugs. And that driver is running inside the kernel, with the ability to corrupt anything and everything on the system. Usually it doesn't, but it has the capability, and it has demonstrated the inclination on occasion. Tracking down memory corruption bugs is a fantastic pain in the ass even when you have the source code, let alone when you don't.

Re:support costs

[Anonymous Coward]

[citation needed]

I wish nVidia would just open up their driver

[apexwm]

It would be nice if nVidia would just release the driver under the GNU General Public License. That way it could be integrated directly into Linux distributions. In my opinion this would give nVidia a huge advantage. They already have an advantage with excellent support in Unix/Linux, but doing this would take it one step farther. Reverse engineering the Nouveau 3D driver is duplicating the effort, especially when the official driver is already out there and is solid.

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[acteon]

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