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

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

[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.

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.