X.Org To Pay For Better Nouveau GPU Reclocking

[phoronix]

Phoronix: X.Org To Pay For Better Nouveau GPU Reclocking

With X.Org / Mesa / Wayland not being part of this year's GSoC, the X.Org Foundation is independently paying for some projects to motivate students over to summer to make some open-source driver improvements...

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

[fhuberts]

I don't get it.
How come there is money pumped into supporting hardware from a company that is completely Open Source hostile??

This money is way better spent in improving Intel and AMD hardware!
And since Intel has quite a large team itself, that would make AMD _the_ candidate to receive this work/money/TLC.

Or even better, work on _generic_ infrastructure.

I can think of a few examples: Gallium, OpenCL, OpenVG, OpenGL 3.x, OpenGL 4.x, etc...

[MùPùF]

I don't get it.
How come there is money pumped into supporting hardware from a company that is completely Open Source hostile??

This money is way better spent in improving Intel and AMD hardware!
And since Intel has quite a large team itself, that would make AMD _the_ candidate to receive this work/money/TLC.

Or even better, work on _generic_ infrastructure.

I can think of a few examples: Gallium, OpenCL, OpenVG, OpenGL 3.x, OpenGL 4.x, etc...

Right but remember that nouveau is only effective/useful on "old" cards. So, Nouveau is more about providing open source support for unsupported/poorly-supported cards.
Seeing things this way, we prevent people from trashing fairly good hardware just because it doesn't work anymore with the proprietary driver.
FYI, we still support tnt2 cards!

As for AMD and Intel hardware, open source support is already way better when it comes to power management than Nouveau. So, it is just a matter of providing at least a minimal service.

[halfmanhalfamazing]

I'm with fhuberts on this one.

I've got my share of both new/old hardware, so I am one who can appreciate and loves the fact that I can get further life out of my old hardware, but let's take _self_ out of the equation here. We have *got* to get new features in place and continue to modernize, and getting things like newer OpenGL spec is one of those things that doesn't "benefit any specific camp", that is, it'll benefit the AMD people as well as the Nouveau people(as they build on the newer nvidia cards).

We don't have endless moneybags like the big proprietary vendors such as Microsoft or Apple. Really? This is really the best use of limited available limited resources? Did I mention that they're limited?

I'm not saying it's not important, I'm saying it can't(really?) be the highest priority. TNT2 cards?

Even for those of us who aren't the most gamer-heavy users, I think all can realize and agree that what it's going to take to make OSS/Linux a more viable competitor is the introduction of games to the linux environment. That isn't going to be built upon the back of better support for TNT2 cards. Or GF3MXs.

[MùPùF]

I'm with fhuberts on this one.

I've got my share of both new/old hardware, so I am one who can appreciate and loves the fact that I can get further life out of my old hardware, but let's take _self_ out of the equation here. We have *got* to get new features in place and continue to modernize, and getting things like newer OpenGL spec is one of those things that doesn't "benefit any specific camp", that is, it'll benefit the AMD people as well as the Nouveau people(as they build on the newer nvidia cards).

We don't have endless moneybags like the big proprietary vendors such as Microsoft or Apple. Really? This is really the best use of limited available limited resources? Did I mention that they're limited?

I'm not saying it's not important, I'm saying it can't(really?) be the highest priority. TNT2 cards?

Even for those of us who aren't the most gamer-heavy users, I think all can realize and agree that what it's going to take to make OSS/Linux a more viable competitor is the introduction of games to the linux environment. That isn't going to be built upon the back of better support for TNT2 cards. Or GF3MXs.

If you took the time to at least read the proposals, you would see that the work is for geforce 8 and later (with a strong emphasis on Fermi).

There is no point in having OpenGL4 on Fermis if they are clocked at 1/10th of the normal clock speeds. It would be unplayable anyway!

[RussianNeuroMancer]

MùPùF, may please look into tearing issue?
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37681

[boltronics]

So, Nouveau is more about providing open source support for unsupported/poorly-supported cards.

and then

If you took the time to at least read the proposals, you would see that the work is for geforce 8 and later (with a strong emphasis on Fermi).

You contradicted yourself. So which is it; is the point of nouveau to focus on old unsupported hardware or new Fermi hardware?

I also have to agree with fhuberts that X.Org shouldn't waste time focusing on reverse engineering new products from companies that don't care about free software, at least not beyond just having basic functionality working.

All my current APU/GPUs are AMD because I do play games on GNU/Linux with the [mostly] free radeon drivers wherever I can. If everyone did that, maybe Nvidia would wake up and realise they're losing sales by behaving the way they are. What X.Org is doing is saying it's okay for Nvidia to just keep doing what it's doing, and it's okay to buy Nvidia GPUs because X.Org will still try to figure out how to support you.

[curaga]

Right but remember that nouveau is only effective/useful on "old" cards. So, Nouveau is more about providing open source support for unsupported/poorly-supported cards.
Seeing things this way, we prevent people from trashing fairly good hardware just because it doesn't work anymore with the proprietary driver.
FYI, we still support tnt2 cards!

I actually have a TNT2 somewhere. So if I set it up with latest nouveau, how would it work? KMS + power management + GL 1.x able to run OA 0.8.5 / ETracer?

[entropy]

I also have to agree with fhuberts that X.Org shouldn't waste time focusing on reverse engineering new products from companies that don't care about free software

I couldn't agree more. Prioritized funding of reverse engineering projects, while there are other vendors that provide specs and still need additional man power, is definitely not the right sign IMHO.

[MùPùF]

and then
You contradicted yourself. So which is it; is the point of nouveau to focus on old unsupported hardware or new Fermi hardware?

Indeed, it looks like I contradict myself, here is the reason why : we don't wait for nvidia to deprecate some cards before we start implementing support for it.

Fermi was released a year ago, 3D works great but performance is slow.
Let's say it takes a year before getting reclocking perfectly done and merged, Fermi will be 3 years old when nouveau will be ready for it.
3 years is old, isn't it?

That was my point.

As for your point about nvidia hw being not free at all, I agree. I used to think the same way up until I was given a perfect laptop ... with a nvidia card... What should I had done? Trash it? Resell it? Improve the reverse-engineered driver ?
What do you think about the Lima project? Is it worthless too?

My view: Minimal support for all devices/peripherals should be included in Linux, through reverse engineering or not.