What Will Happen To xf86-video-nv In 2010?

[DeepDayze]

Quite simply to have a quick and dirty same day offering for base level support without having to worry about nouveau eventually trying to provide features that they may not want to have in a opensource solution. So they can either maintain the status quo or submit patches that may drastically alter nouveau's offering. Right now their cost and resources spent in the opensource solution is minimal.

They'd better improve it enough to make it worthwhile...nv does not support the newest cards at the moment.

If nouveau does reach the level where it's feature complete then I'd say give nv the ol' heave ho

[deanjo]

They'd better improve it enough to make it worthwhile...nv does not support the newest cards at the moment.

If nouveau does reach the level where it's feature complete then I'd say give nv the ol' heave ho

I don't know, I kind of like how nouveau is developed right now without any input from nvidia after seeing how people screaming for specs to the ATI hardware and then expecting ATI to do the development for them after providing them, give an inch they then expect a mile. Ironically most of the screamers are the same people that couldn't tell the difference between a header file and a .c file.

[RahulSundaram]

I don't know, I kind of like how nouveau is developed right now without any input from nvidia after seeing how people screaming for specs to the ATI hardware and then expecting ATI to do the development for them after providing them, give an inch they then expect a mile. Ironically most of the screamers are the same people that couldn't tell the difference between a header file and a .c file.

Regardless of uninformed opinions, ATI documentation has certainly helped move development faster and primary development on the Radeon driver and noone is waiting on ATI to do all the development. Nouveau development is moving at a amazing rate but certainly shackled by the lack of good documentation.

[King InuYasha]

Regardless of uninformed opinions, ATI documentation has certainly helped move development faster and primary development on the Radeon driver and noone is waiting on ATI to do all the development. Nouveau development is moving at a amazing rate but certainly shackled by the lack of good documentation.

But if it isn't one thing, it would be another. Just be glad we even have any development going on in the nouveau driver. Yell all you want, but nothing will get done. All they will say is something to the effect of the following infuriating phrase: "Contributions welcome"

To me, the nouveau driver is old news. What WOULD be big news is information on nouveau's Gallium drivers that add 3D support to nouveau.

[deanjo]

Regardless of uninformed opinions, ATI documentation has certainly helped move development faster and primary development on the Radeon driver and noone is waiting on ATI to do all the development. Nouveau development is moving at a amazing rate but certainly shackled by the lack of good documentation.

For all the years of yelling, ATI/AMD should have had to do nothing but provide the specs. You do realize that it is the "informed" that provide the "uninformed" with the idea that was all that was needed. Where would the opensource ATI drivers be without ATI's code?

[RahulSundaram]

For all the years of yelling, ATI/AMD should have had to do nothing but provide the specs. You do realize that it is the "informed" that provide the "uninformed" with the idea that was all that was needed. Where would the opensource ATI drivers be without ATI's code?

I don't think any amount of yelling helps even a tiny bit to be honest. There is market pressure that helps but users have to vote with their money and not just their mouth. Nvidia will not help at all with development of Nouveau as long as they remain popular. That's almost guaranteed.

Radeon driver was already making very good progress and documentation has certainly helped but as Nouveau driver has proved, with enough focussed effort, we can jump through the hurdles necessary. Pidgin, Empathy et all support a crap load of protocols, almost all of them entirely reverse engineered as well.

In short, reward good behaviour with your money.

[MostAwesomeDude]

With regards to the ATI sub-thread, I'd like to note that nearly all of the current work put in on the Mesa and Gallium ATI drivers has been either commissioned through PI/TG prior to AMD's acquisition of ATI, or written by volunteers using AMD's docs.

Anyway, to answer the big question, nVidia will continue to maintain both nv and nvidia, and continue to ship nv in the Xorg katamari to the best of their ability.

Why, you ask? Simple. nVidia doesn't maintain nv for us; they maintain nv so that their customers (the people who buy their consumer-market cards) have an out-of-box solution that nVidia themselves can guarantee. Since they haven't written a single line of nouveau (save for the lines originally from nv), they can't actually make that promise without keeping nv.

For the same reason, nvidia will continue to exist, except that in this context, the customers are people buying professional hardware. Y'know, Quadros and Teslas.

Always annotative, never authoritative,
~ C.

[L33F3R]

i switch from Nvidia to an amd grafic card in 2007!

WOW! good for you!

if free people, if we wana peace, software peace of Freedome, Nvidia must DIE!

So you need to kill nvidia to get peace? Gandhi ought to slap your ass.

Ahh wait a second no he wouldn't, kinda because hes Gandhi...

Die Nvidia i hope you DIE!!!!

Whats with all these screaming idiots wanting everything to die recently. FOSS - we attract the very brightest, and the downright insane.

[ethana2]

I own an nVidia GeForce 8400M GS. ..I don't do as much gaming as I thought I would.

If nouveau can run Compiz with basic effects responsively and not crash, and has KMS.. I don't even care about framerates.

I bought an X-25M to get blazing fast (~4s total) cold boot times. It's looking like actually getting those times will involve both CoreBoot and Nouveau.

[deanjo]

I don't think any amount of yelling helps even a tiny bit to be honest. There is market pressure that helps but users have to vote with their money and not just their mouth. Nvidia will not help at all with development of Nouveau as long as they remain popular. That's almost guaranteed.

Right yelling doesn't help but yet there are Xorg devs that continue to scream "open the blob" and the likes. This certainly does not make things any better nor does it come across as professional.

Radeon driver was already making very good progress and documentation has certainly helped but as Nouveau driver has proved, with enough focussed effort, we can jump through the hurdles necessary. Pidgin, Empathy et all support a crap load of protocols, almost all of them entirely reverse engineered as well.

Absolutely, the nouveau devs are doing an excellent job, no argument here.

In short, reward good behaviour with your money.

and

For the same reason, nvidia will continue to exist, except that in this context, the customers are people buying professional hardware. Y'know, Quadros and Teslas.

Always annotative, never authoritative,
~ C.

This is where I really do disagree. Until the opensource alternatives can match feature for feature and performance wise you cannot claim equality nor say nvidia will only exist for the professional market. When I go to the store I go to buy what gives me the most bang for the buck with the most features that I will use. I will not buy a product based on future planned features as by that time happens that card is relatively outdated. I'm not the only one doing this. One of the big things nowdays for example is video playback and covering the "basics" is not good enough. Vdpau for example made cheap cards that nvidia makes a extremely compelling reason to stick with blobs and their cards. "Flicker free booting" while nice and all doesn't do anything for actual productivity. I have yet to see anybody do any work on a same system that was booting. Same with XRandR support. While it is nice to see X making an attempt to catch up in functionality of what other OS's have had for years, it's still a relatively minor issue as most people no matter what the OS stick to 1 resolution, orientation, spanning. It's a set and forget feature for most people unlike items like accelerated video playback which I guarantee gets heavier real practical use then "flicker free booting" and XRandR mode switching.

Instead of telling consumers "vote with your pocket books" here is a alternative way of doing it (which has been VERY successful for our company which also does opensource). If you have the specs released, instead of saying "consumer pay us to do it" put a hit list out on the features and pay for independents to take on the task. Example:

Users want flaw free accelerated HD playback, put out ads saying such

"$4000 for a working implementation of accelerated x264 playback in the XYZ's brand foss driver, submit code and upon acceptance payment will be made"

If manufacturer's, commercial distro's, etc would do this it would probably speed up development of wanted features. Get those features in there in a timely manner and then people purchasing your products will follow.