Testing Out The Nouveau Driver On Fedora 11

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Testing Out The Nouveau Driver On Fedora 11

With the forthcoming release of Fedora 11, Red Hat has made the bold (but wise) decision of replacing xf86-video-nv as the default open-source NVIDIA driver with the Nouveau driver instead. The xf86-video-nv driver is officially maintained by NVIDIA, but it's their half-assed attempt at being open-source friendly...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzE3OA

[faemir]

I have to say well done to both Fedora and the Nouveau developers!

It would be ironic if Nouveau got into a better state overall than the radeonhd or ati drivers =/

[Remco]

How is multi-monitor hotplugging support?

The proprietary Nvidia drivers always had a problem with this. If you plug in a monitor, it isn't recognized. Then, when you detect the monitor through Nvidia X Server Settings, the monitors are combined into one big screen. Maximizing a window will stretch it over all available monitors. You have to log out and restart the X server before multi-monitor works correctly.

[sreyan]

Fantastic work done by fedora as usual.

I only wish yum was half as fast as apt, and there was a fully open source equivalent to canonical's soyuz. To bad that neither will ever happen.

[some-guy]

Fantastic work done by fedora as usual.

I only wish yum was half as fast as apt, and there was a fully open source equivalent to canonical's soyuz. To bad that neither will ever happen.
If zypper was ported over (stalled because fedora had a rpm upgrade), I would probably switch over to fedora. Yum isn't that slow though, but zypper destroys it.

[sreyan]

On most modern hardware yum is probably fine.

On my aspire one (atom n270, 8GiB ssd) it took over 14 hours to upgrade from fedora 10 to rawhide. This was mid February. 14 hours is far too long to upgrade to a following release.

[giallu]

I only wish yum was half as fast as apt

did you try any recent yum version? speed was one of the recent focus on development. Additionally, rpm 4.7 is also bringing more speed to the transaction, so I suggest you really give a spin to F11 beta (out in two days)

[sreyan]

My experience with yum is fairly current. Fedora 10 was what I tried to upgrade to rawhide as I detailed above.

I will see if i can make it repeatable and provide more information.

[bugmenot]

This is just awesome! :)

A big thank you to all nouveau and fedora developers! Great work.

[DeepDayze]

I have to say well done to both Fedora and the Nouveau developers!

It would be ironic if Nouveau got into a better state overall than the radeonhd or ati drivers =/

Would be nice to see it in full 3d glory :)

[korpenkraxar]

If you guys are interested in fast package management and installers I can really recommend Arch's pacman and also its derivate found in Frugalware. I my experience pacman runs circles around everything else I've tried.

[hybrid-kernel]

If only you had a better camera =/

[giallu]

@Michael:

that problem you found on the syncmaster 305T could be fixed in time for F11, but this is unlikely if you don't report it on http://bugzilla.redhat.com.

So please, open up a new report and remember to attach the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file created during startup.

[faemir]

If you guys are interested in fast package management and installers I can really recommend Arch's pacman and also its derivate found in Frugalware. I my experience pacman runs circles around everything else I've tried.

I'll heartily second that :D

[remm]

did you try any recent yum version? speed was one of the recent focus on development. Additionally, rpm 4.7 is also bringing more speed to the transaction, so I suggest you really give a spin to F11 beta (out in two days)

I also found the rpm/yum from F11 to be faster (very much in "fast enough" land for me). Although Nouveau makes the big news, the Radeon driver is very good for 2D on R600+ cards in F11 (in F10 it varies from horrible to ok depending on the card). KMS is not functional on R600+ though, but I suppose the 3D support will be integrated as soon as it's out.

[spykes]

My experience with yum is fairly current. Fedora 10 was what I tried to upgrade to rawhide as I detailed above.

I will see if i can make it repeatable and provide more information.

Once you are on the current version (F11), there is a new feature (DeltaRPM) that will speed-up yum updates.
You just have to enable DeltaRPM repositories.

[md1032]

How is multi-monitor hotplugging support?

The proprietary Nvidia drivers always had a problem with this. If you plug in a monitor, it isn't recognized. Then, when you detect the monitor through Nvidia X Server Settings, the monitors are combined into one big screen. Maximizing a window will stretch it over all available monitors. You have to log out and restart the X server before multi-monitor works correctly.
When was the last time you tried it? This was fixed ages ago.

[sreyan]

Once you are on the current version (F11), there is a new feature (DeltaRPM) that will speed-up yum updates.
You just have to enable DeltaRPM repositories.

I hope so :) At this point I am eagerly awaiting tomorrow's beta.

I reinstalled F10 686 live cd on my netbook last night. The install itself was quick.

To recreate what I had done before I installed openoffice writer impress and calc. This was surprisingly slow, taking far longer than it took to install Fedora itself. I then installed the download only plugin for yum so i could do a fully cached run.

Then I proceeded In the following manner:

$ yum clean all
$ time yum --disablerepo=* --enablerepo=rawhide update --downloadonly

and then finally:

$ time yum --disablerepo=* --enablerepo=rawhide update -y -C

Which seems to fail because of a lack of disk space, though i have 828 MiB free and i went with the default massive swap space of ~3 gb in case having no swap was killing yum performance.

Though it takes just under 13 minutes to realize 828MB of space isn't enough to do the upgrade. Moreover it runs a "transaction test" which seems to proceed just fine and then begins to run the transaction before it fails. That is pretty terrible.

For the fedora users here, I'd appreciate pointers on the following:

1. Am I doing something dumb with yum? Please if I am misusing the tool and that's not how upgrades are done, let me know.

2. Running top showed that yum-backend.py wasn't using that much cpu. Maybe yum is being optimized in the wrong area? the SSD in the Aspire One (I have an A110) is extremely slow. I just can't imagine that debs would be less disk intensive than rpms. The ssd is a piece of crap and the ssd controller in it is know to have really terrible speeds with lots of small files.

3. Is there a daily cd spin of rawhide? I've been able to find a few ones for testing intel kms and nouveau but not a regular daily build. It seems trivial but would mean an awful lot to users who want to contribute more back to upstream.

[sreyan]

If you guys are interested in fast package management and installers I can really recommend Arch's pacman and also its derivate found in Frugalware. I my experience pacman runs circles around everything else I've tried.

Arch seems really cool I will look at it later.

[jazzor]

I can see that their 20 second startup (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/20SecondStartup) is really coming along nicely...only about 100 seconds to shave off.

If they do actually achieve 20 second startup, I dont think anyone would actually care if it flickered or not.

[Adriano ML]

Arch seems really cool I will look at it later.

Arch really has the fastest package manager and the newest version of any software you want. BUT you will have to put your hands to work, it takes some time until you learn how everything works (but at the end it allways works nice!).

[spykes]

I hope so :) At this point I am eagerly awaiting tomorrow's beta.

I reinstalled F10 686 live cd on my netbook last night. The install itself was quick.

To recreate what I had done before I installed openoffice writer impress and calc. This was surprisingly slow, taking far longer than it took to install Fedora itself. I then installed the download only plugin for yum so i could do a fully cached run.

Then I proceeded In the following manner:

$ yum clean all
$ time yum --disablerepo=* --enablerepo=rawhide update --downloadonly

and then finally:

$ time yum --disablerepo=* --enablerepo=rawhide update -y -C

Which seems to fail because of a lack of disk space, though i have 828 MiB free and i went with the default massive swap space of ~3 gb in case having no swap was killing yum performance.

Though it takes just under 13 minutes to realize 828MB of space isn't enough to do the upgrade. Moreover it runs a "transaction test" which seems to proceed just fine and then begins to run the transaction before it fails. That is pretty terrible.

For the fedora users here, I'd appreciate pointers on the following:

1. Am I doing something dumb with yum? Please if I am misusing the tool and that's not how upgrades are done, let me know.

2. Running top showed that yum-backend.py wasn't using that much cpu. Maybe yum is being optimized in the wrong area? the SSD in the Aspire One (I have an A110) is extremely slow. I just can't imagine that debs would be less disk intensive than rpms. The ssd is a piece of crap and the ssd controller in it is know to have really terrible speeds with lots of small files.

3. Is there a daily cd spin of rawhide? I've been able to find a few ones for testing intel kms and nouveau but not a regular daily build. It seems trivial but would mean an awful lot to users who want to contribute more back to upstream.

If you want to upgrade from F10, you should try the "preupgrade" utility, it's very easy :
yum install preupgrade

[kiersie]

I can see that their 20 second startup (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/20SecondStartup) is really coming along nicely...only about 100 seconds to shave off.

If they do actually achieve 20 second startup, I dont think anyone would actually care if it flickered or not.

Its an live-cd.

[snogglethorpe]

It looks very nice, but why on earth is booting so incredibly, insanely, slow?! Did you run the demo on some ancient hardware?

[spykes]

It looks very nice, but why on earth is booting so incredibly, insanely, slow?! Did you run the demo on some ancient hardware?

It seems the demo is running from a Live-CD, which could explain why it's so slow...

[Kano]

cd is usally really slow, but in some cases you can use a usb storage media too for live mode and that gives incredible speed improvements. Also hd install from a fast usb media is often possible in less than 2 mins!

[BlackStar]

Indeed, LiveUSB is insane. Not only as installation media (where it blows CDs away), but also as recovery media. I always carry an Ubuntu stick with me, just in case :)

[AdamW]

To take a few points :)

As others have noted, the boot is slow because it's running from a live CD.

remco, multi-monitor support is mostly working well - it's RandR 1.2 - but has the same problem the intel driver had until very recently: no dynamic framebuffer resizing. Basically, as you had to with the intel driver, you have to add a Virtual line to /etc/X11/xorg.conf to set the framebuffer to the correct resolution for the two monitors combined. This will be fixed in future, but sadly not yet.

Michael, as giallu says, please file a bug on the default resolution issue if you haven't already. We really need bugs to be filed to fix any problems :) Please include the /var/log/Xorg.0.log from the boot.

sreyan, no, at present there isn't a daily build of Rawhide live. the main problem is actually finding somewhere with space to upload one...at present we're doing one at least once a week, for test days.

[Ferdinand]

How does the dual dvi work you need for a 30" monitor? Do you have to use the 2 dvi ports on your videocard? Would that mean that you can only use 1 30" monitor or 2 24" inch monitors?

[CrystalCowboy]

Dual Link DVI - see for example the description at Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Visual_Interface#Connector).

Dual Link DVI takes only one cable, but it has more pins than a single Link DVI in order to double the bandwidth.

[Ferdinand]

Dual Link DVI - see for example the description at Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Visual_Interface#Connector).

Dual Link DVI takes only one cable, but it has more pins than a single Link DVI in order to double the bandwidth.

Thank you for explaining that in one short easy sentence. I should have thought about looking on wikipedia.:rolleyes:

[lbcoder]

On most modern hardware yum is probably fine.

On my aspire one (atom n270, 8GiB ssd) it took over 14 hours to upgrade from fedora 10 to rawhide. This was mid February. 14 hours is far too long to upgrade to a following release.

Old post I know, but need to correct some misinformation.

Aspire 1 SSDs have a dreadfully slow WRITE SPEED. This is the reason why this is SO BLOODY SLOW. You can grow old and die waiting for writes on these things.

That being said, the read speed is phenomenal. They boot in under 10 seconds (when configured to disable all the useless crap).

[nanonyme]

Old post I know, but need to correct some misinformation.

Aspire 1 SSDs have a dreadfully slow WRITE SPEED. This is the reason why this is SO BLOODY SLOW. You can grow old and die waiting for writes on these things.

That being said, the read speed is phenomenal. They boot in under 10 seconds (when configured to disable all the useless crap).Sounds like something you want AHCI and SATA's native command queuing with.