Nouveau Companion 40

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Nouveau Companion 40

It's been almost six months since the last issue of the Nouveau Companion, but Pekka Paalanen has rejuvenated these efforts and has put out the 40th issue of this newsletter that updates the open-source community on the status of the Nouveau project, an effort to reverse-engineer NVIDIA's binary driver and provide a fully open-source 2D and 3D implementation. While we have been without the Nouveau Companion for many months, progress on the open-source Nouveau driver has continued. There is now GeForce 8 support with 2D EXA acceleration, work underway in implementing Gallium3D, switching the driver's memory manager from TTM to using a GEM API with TTM internals (similar to the ATI driver), and of course kernel mode-setting.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=13039

[Eragon]

They are farther than I tought, which is good news, but it's still crap :(

[TechMage89]

Unfortunately, there are no full time developers for nouveau, probably because none of the commercial distro makers wants to tick of nvidia.

Therefore development of nouveau is done (I think) exclusively by hackers who work on it in their free time. Therefore, as reverse engineering and programming a graphics driver (which is starting to resemble an operating system in and of itself) is not an easy or simple task, progress goes slowly.

[Pfanne]

Unfortunately, there are no full time developers for nouveau, probably because none of the commercial distro makers wants to tick of nvidia.

why would they tick nvidia off by improving the open source experience with their hardware...

[ethana2]

...because nVidia is fricking paranoid about people maybe having a clue how their gpu's work, as if they were something special, that's why.

[deanjo]

why would they tick nvidia off by improving the open source experience with their hardware...

They don't get ticked off, otherwise they would have been ticked with nvraid, forcedeth and alsa support.

[stan]

There's a shortage of developers even for hardware that is relatively well documented (ie. R500). Why would distros want to waste their scarce resources to help out NVidious, a company that doesn't give a **** about open source and software freedom?

[_txf_]

There's a shortage of developers even for hardware that is relatively well documented (ie. R500). Why would distros want to waste their scarce resources to help out NVidious, a company that doesn't give a **** about open source and software freedom?

Because they would be helping the users, not nvidia. As far as I'm aware the majority of linux users that have a proper gpu tend to have nvidia...

[remm]

At some point, users who are interested in open source should still get a clue and not buy NVidia.

[krazy]

Because they would be helping the users, not nvidia. As far as I'm aware the majority of linux users that have a proper gpu tend to have nvidia...
Making nvidia cards work on linux through no effort of the hardware provider would improve popularity of those cards among linux users - more cash in nvidia's pocket.

Here's an interesting analysis of the graphics market.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/hardware.ars/2008/08/18/ati-projects-significant-market-share-gain-by-end-of-2008

[MaestroMaus]

This attitude will get us nowhere.

Most of the people want Open Source software because it tends to be better, simply because people can change it and because it is free.

NVidia is marketleader, and always ahead on the competition. They don't want to document their technology because they are afraid this might be used by the competition.

NVidia does however release free, market leading drivers for Linux users, making it the best choice performance wise. Therefore it isn't so much of an issue to me and I think most of the users.

I understand you would rather have it opened up, but there are a lot more things to worry about in Linux world then NVidia right now. Actually if more company's would react like NVidia, Linux would have been much further right now.

[deanjo]

This attitude will get us nowhere.

Most of the people want Open Source software because it tends to be better, simply because people can change it and because it is free.


I wouldn't say that it tends to be better. It can be, but at the same time it can be much worse. There are several areas where FOSS alternatives simply are years, maybe even decades, behind commercial closed source alternatives. I would venture to guess that 99.9% of FOSS software users wouldn't be able to diddily squat with sourcecode and still rely on others to fix bugs and add features but yet they like to drum the FOSS line saying "But we can't modify the source and make it better" just to join on the bitch and whine wagon.

[MaestroMaus]

I wouldn't say that it tends to be better. It can be, but at the same time it can be much worse. There are several areas where FOSS alternatives simply are years, maybe even decades, behind commercial closed source alternatives. I would venture to guess that 99.9% of FOSS software users wouldn't be able to diddily squat with source code and still rely on others to fix bugs and add features but yet they like to drum the FOSS line saying "But we can't modify the source and make it better" just to join on the bitch and whine wagon.

I do not completely agree with you. It's true, there is allot of bad O.S.S. out there, but there is also allot of bad C.S.S. out there. I think that if we could look at it relatively, there would be a lot more decent O.S.S. then C.S.S.

You and I both can't be sure about it of course. We can't come with evidence of it, since it's impossible to take a look at all programs, and O.S.S. hasn't gotten as much attention as C.S.S had.

Your second point is just the way things usually go with everything (C.S.S. included). For example: There is only a small percentage of the population educated/trained/experienced enough to know allot about cars. Yet everyone thinks he knows something about them, and bitches about how bad a specific brand/model of car is because in the past blablabla...

It's all a bit Philosophical tho. I don't think anyone will ever be able to solve the C.S.S. VS O.S.S. battle.

[deanjo]

I do not completely agree with you. It's true, there is allot of bad O.S.S. out there, but there is also allot of bad C.S.S. out there. I think that if we could look at it relatively, there would be a lot more decent O.S.S. then C.S.S.



There are so much 1/2 finished, abandoned, or just poorly developed foss software out there that I really would have to say that proprietary stuff has a better record of project completion simply for the fact that the majority of the developers are getting paid to do so. Over 2/3's of sourceforge for example comprises of projects that never got off the ground, never completed or unmaintained for example. Commercial closed source development generally doesn't abandon development until a project is at least to a certian level of completion unless absolutely necessary.

[MaestroMaus]

There are so much 1/2 finished, abandoned, or just poorly developed foss software out there that I really would have to say that proprietary stuff has a better record of project completion simply for the fact that the majority of the developers are getting paid to do so. Over 2/3's of sourceforge for example comprises of projects that never got off the ground, never completed or unmaintained for example. Commercial closed source development generally doesn't abandon development until a project is at least to a certian level of completion unless absolutely necessary.

Yeah, but you don't take into account that you will almost never hear about projects that are partially or entirely cut, because they are written by company's who wish to protect their name.

[yesterday]

There are so much 1/2 finished, abandoned, or just poorly developed foss software out there that I really would have to say that proprietary stuff has a better record of project completion simply for the fact that the majority of the developers are getting paid to do so. Over 2/3's of sourceforge for example comprises of projects that never got off the ground, never completed or unmaintained for example. Commercial closed source development generally doesn't abandon development until a project is at least to a certian level of completion unless absolutely necessary.

You don't know about all the half-arsed proprietary projects out there, so how can you compare? The fact that they are closed source means you can't even catalog them. Saying that OSS is inherently worse than proprietary software just because you are aware of more incomplete open source software projects is disingenuous. The only reason you are aware that they are incomplete is because they are open source.


Just a note on NVIDIA and their "quality drivers". I have had numerous unresolved issues with my 7900gs on both Linux and Vista. Some of these I've had for more than a year. To me, NVIDIA exemplify the benefit of open source drivers at least. When a manufacturer decides to stop supporting your product (and in the graphics world a refresh seems to be every 6 months), then with proprietary software you are left with peanuts. Windows devs themselves recognised the issue with device drivers. They apparently have been the cause for most of the Windows crashes in their past OSs. For Vista they decided to go down the driver signing route, which seems a bit silly since they only thing it guarentees is that the company can afford to purchase a Certificate from a CA and purchase the WDK signing kit or whatever. It's a pity that Microsoft dislikes open source stuff so much, because having some form of open source drivers in Windows would be infinitely more useful to their OS team than these "signed" drivers.

[tmpdir]

Where did the train go? ;)

[MaestroMaus]

Just a note on NVIDIA and their "quality drivers". I have had numerous unresolved issues with my 7900gs on both Linux and Vista. Some of these I've had for more than a year. To me, NVIDIA exemplify the benefit of open source drivers at least. When a manufacturer decides to stop supporting your product (and in the graphics world a refresh seems to be every 6 months), then with proprietary software you are left with peanuts. Windows devs themselves recognised the issue with device drivers. They apparently have been the cause for most of the Windows crashes in their past OSs. For Vista they decided to go down the driver signing route, which seems a bit silly since they only thing it guarentees is that the company can afford to purchase a Certificate from a CA and purchase the WDK signing kit or whatever. It's a pity that Microsoft dislikes open source stuff so much, because having some form of open source drivers in Windows would be infinitely more useful to their OS team than these "signed" drivers.

Everything is relative. I didn't say their perfect. I said they where industry leading. Just buy a ATI card and use it for a few years. You'll learn to appreciate NVidia (no matter what OS).

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate AMD/ATI attempts to support the OS community, but the drivers are simply not as good as the ones we get from NVidia on both Windows and Linux (for now).