Q&A With Nouveau Driver Developers

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Q&A With Nouveau Driver Developers

Do you have a question you've been wanting to ask the open-source 3D driver developers for NVIDIA hardware about their Nouveau work or their thoughts on some related Linux topic? We are accepting questions in this Phoronix Forums thread. After we've got a good stack of questions they will be answered by the Nouveau developers.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NTk3NA

[lejocelyn]

Hi,

I would like to know if there is some list of cards that the driver will support ? Actually, it's to know if old cards like Gforce 2 GTS will be supported and what this kind of cards will be able to do, if it will support for example compiz-fusion or not (yeah, I'm dreaming :) ).

Will fedora 8 support by default the Nouveau driver ?

[StringCheesian]

What kind of official/corporate attention has the Nouveau project seen? Anything interesting or potential sources of manpower, info, or other help? nVidia, distros, etc?

[[Knuckles]]

Hey.

Do you think it'll ever be possible to reach performance-parity with the closed-source nvidia drivers, or even with the windows nvidia drivers?

Are there any cards you're missing that would help development (except the G8X, that are regularly mentioned)?

What do you generally think of NVIDIA's hardware? Does it have ugly things that generally get masked by software and that you're uncovering now, or do you generally like their designs?

[Michael]

Here's a few questions... More to come when time permits.

Where do you see the driver in the next 6 months? Year? Two Years?

Has NVIDIA contacted any Nouveau developers about the driver?

If there was one thing you wanted to tell NVIDIA aside from "give us the source code" or "give us the specifications", what would it be?

Are you confident that at some point in the future there will be Scalable Link Interface (SLI) support with the Nouveau driver?

How many hours per day on average are the Nouveau developers working on the driver?

[Moustacha]

What can those with minimal coding experience do to help out (without stuffing up their machine)?

[Huenengrab]

You can run REnuoveau to log the registers being used while using 3d-apps.

[Regenwald]

do you think that tv out, s-video etc. will ever work? what do you think about the current performance? do you think about releasing benchmarks? what about dual-screen?

thanks

[ssam]

I have been using nouveau on ubuntu gutsy with RAOF's packages ( http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=3186662 ) for the past few days and they seem pretty stable on a 7300.

at what point do you think nouveau will replace nv?

is nouveau already as good as nv for 2d stuff? (have i been lucky)? if so why have none of the distros put it in as default yet?

[ssam]

also do you accept hardware donations?

[hmmm]

Once basic 2d/3d support and Randr is completed, what would be next on the agenda for nouveau?
Have you looked at trying to implement purevideo?
Have tried to approach nvidia to release the ancient detonator drivers or older forceware drivers as opensource?
How does work done on the ATI open source & intel open source drivers, mesa, Randr and X.Org influence your work?

[srouquette]

I have a 8800 GTX and i'd like to help, but I don't have linux installed yet. is there a live cd with everything to test the drivers from the cd ?

[yoshi314]

my question would be : are you having problems with insufficient user exposure/manpower, because nvidia blob is "good enough" for most people?

[Regenwald]

are looking forward for an integration in the x.org-server? (don't know about licence issues)

[Michael]

Thanks for all of the questions.

All of the answers will be posted Monday (September 3).