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What's Up With RadeonHD & Nouveau?
Phoronix: What's Up With RadeonHD & Nouveau?
Yesterday in the Phoronix Forums it was asked what's up with the Nouveau and RadeonHD drivers, which happens to be a very good question. The last time we had much to report on with regard to RadeonHD, the driver created by Novell for use with ATI R500+ GPUs, was back in July when it received better power management capabilities...
http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=NzU5NA
Phoronix Member
I don't think there's much to expect now from radeonhd, as the ati driver seems to have much more momentum and delivers on almost all accounts now. And since the road seems to have in the future everything either in the kernel DRM or in Gallium, there may not be any need for specific X drivers within two years.
On the other hand, it's a bit troublesome that Nouveau seems to stall. :-(
Senior Member
I dont see a problem, radeonhd makes no sense or whatīs the different to radeon, or have somebody really have fun to make redundant work?
The nouvou driver makes also not that much sense. Because nvidia looses itīs market share and it would be better do support that firms that work with the community instead of pushing freely nvidia with such a driver and "the better linux experince with nvidia hardware" the free software movement is now strong enough to ignore such a firm who dont like to work with us. The user gets that experince who nvidia wish to give if that feeling (closed source) driver is not right or users have problems with it (upgrading...) most people would see the guilty in this game.
It takes even the presure from Nvidia to release their specs if somebody makes with unnecessary hard work by reverse engineering a good driver for their hardware.
But if somebody have to much time, feel free to do it, but I donīt get the point its not importent for linux or its forthcoming to support nvidia. If nvidia will not support opensource, we should not support it by our self for free against nvidia.
Senior Member
Spontaneously, I don't think the movement is "strong enough" to ignore crucial hardware makers with a fast developing pace like nVidia, which they need to have for the market share.Originally Posted by blackiwid
If you think otherwise I am interested to hear how you meant.
.
Last edited by sabriah; 10-10-2009 at 08:40 AM.
Senior Member
Nvidia want to make their own thing (binary propriatary drivers) so letīs do them, and letīs see how long they survife this way. At the moment they lose their market-leading in grafics cards and if they think they can ignore the free/open software movement by not releasing the specs of their cards we will see how that will work out at the mid/long term.
I have the sentence "the customer is the king" in my ears, i donīt think nvidia knows this, or they donīt agree with it. If itīs so and you want to use Linux, there are better solutions availible. If someone likes nvidias binary blobs, and donīt is really interessted in free software, and only use it because the kde theme looks better or he likes compiz or... itīs ok but for this personīs the nvidia drivers are good enough, so for them no free driver is needed. But to invest 100x the time normaly needed to make drivers just because nvidia dont want to open some specs, and reverse engineer it, I donīt get the point.
Itīs a clearer state if you let it like it is. If you want features and you didnīt understand the advantages of opensource buy a nvidia card, if you did understand the points of free software go for amd or intel.
Last edited by blackiwid; 10-09-2009 at 01:52 PM.
Senior Member
radeonhd devs, please help the nouveau guys!
Phoronix Member
It's alive and we have a new release (v1.3.0):What's Up With RadeonHD?
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...item&px=NzU5Ng
Senior Member
I have both nVidia and AIT cards, and run their proprietary drivers because of other apps than the KDE/Compiz candy. Yes, I also think that I understand the benefits of open source. But, to claim that nVidia is its losing market today because they don't provide specs to open source developers needed is ignoring what the market looks like, today. We may be there one day, but it is still some way to go.
Let us pray Windows 7 will be like Vista.
Senior Member
I see RHD has been getting a lot of power management stuff lately... but is it better or worse than -radeon right now?
I wouldn't mind switching drivers to save a watt or two
X.Org Developer
Nouveau is under quite heavy development, there just isn't much reporting of it.
If perhaps Michael could test the F12 Beta or LiveCD on a few nvidia cards, and report on how the non-3D bits work (Xrender, Xv, randr 1.2 etc)
F12 will ship with full KMS support on nearly every nvidia gpu out of the box.
DAve.
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