Nouveau Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Begins Tackling HDMI 2.0 Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Nouveau Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Begins Tackling HDMI 2.0 Support

One of the few longtime independent contributors to the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver, Ilia Mirkin, sent out a set of patches today working on basic HDMI 2.0 functionality for this Linux DRM driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-Basic-HDMI-2.0-Patches

[cRaZy-bisCuiT]

Is karolherbst too busy, so Ilia Mirkin has to do the job now? :'D

[kpedersen]

"limited to running at its boot clock speeds that are often very limited and thus the performance especially poor in areas outside of basic desktop compositing"

I did not know that. I always assumed that it was running at full clock because it seemed to get kinda hot. This did put me off using it for my LibreOffice machine

Does anyone know if it runs at the "lowest" clock speed? Basically, what does "boot clock speed" mean?

[Michael]

"limited to running at its boot clock speeds that are often very limited and thus the performance especially poor in areas outside of basic desktop compositing"

I did not know that. I always assumed that it was running at full clock because it seemed to get kinda hot. This did put me off using it for my LibreOffice machine

Does anyone know if it runs at the "lowest" clock speed? Basically, what does "boot clock speed" mean?

The speed programmed by the vBIOS at boot/initialization time. Yes, it's generally the lowest.

[cybertraveler]

I love Nouveau development news. It's a great project.

I remember reading about the "upcoming" Nouveau driver before it was stable and mainlined. Back then it was exciting too; they were writing a vastly better driver to replace the current one of the time (I forget what the name of the previous one was).

I hope that this project continues to get love and attention. If NVIDIA ever release legal signed firmware for their cards that lack it (thus enabling re-clocking), it unlocks great possibilities for the future. If NVIDIA did this it would probably also attract new developers to Nouveau. I can see why some developers may not feel like working on Nouveau drivers, as they must know that their work is being constrained to artificially-slow graphics cards created by an OEM that does not appreciate their work.

[Tomin]

Does anyone know if it runs at the "lowest" clock speed? Basically, what does "boot clock speed" mean?

It depends on the generation what the clocks are. You should be able to see all the power levels at /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/pstate and the last line tells the current clocks.

[Calinou]

I remember reading about the "upcoming" Nouveau driver before it was stable and mainlined. Back then it was exciting too; they were writing a vastly better driver to replace the current one of the time (I forget what the name of the previous one was).

The old open source driver developed by NVIDIA was called "nv", but it only supported 2D acceleration.

[cybertraveler]

The old open source driver developed by NVIDIA was called "nv", but it only supported 2D acceleration.

Yeah, that's the one. I guess I was excited about Nouveau, in-part, because of their 3D acceleration efforts.

IIRC, many developers at the time said the nv code base was terrible; full-of NVIDIA drive-by, obfuscated, code dumps and a random patchwork of contributions fixing things and holding it together.

[rene]

For those who have no idea how direct hardware, driver programming, e.g. on VGA cards works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjdyd3xcDVY