X.Org To Pay For Better Nouveau GPU Reclocking

[fhuberts]

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.

Sure, but that's ZERO reason to prioritise nouveau.

I have a W520 with an nvidia 2000M. I'd like it to work but that doesn't mean that I agree with nouveau receiving the money.

We need to reward our friends, not our foes

[aljosa]

i have no idea how people get into xorg related development.
i've had a pretty good motivation to use xinput but docs are terrible.

i'm aware of the fact that i don't have required knowledge to develop anything related to xorg but after trying just to use libraries i'm sure that plenty of developers try to join xorg dev community and moments after kill themselves.

[Teho]

Sure, but that's ZERO reason to prioritise nouveau.

I have completely different point of view: As it's important for all GPUs to be properly supported by open source drivers it makes more sense to sponsor work on Nouveau than say AMD or Intel drivers because it requires it the most. I would love to see the day when Nouveau would be close to feature parity with the closed source driver with or without NVIDIAs support.

[fhuberts]

I have completely different point of view: As it's important for all GPUs to be properly supported by open source drivers it makes more sense to sponsor work on Nouveau than say AMD or Intel drivers because it requires it the most. I would love to see the day when Nouveau would be close to feature parity with the closed source driver with or without NVIDIAs support.

And again someone that doesn't seem to be able to distinguish between his personal views and what's good for the larger community.

How about, in a few years, Open Source friendly companies having kick-ass drivers and hostile companies having bad/mediocare drivers.
How's that for an example?

What message are we now sending to our friends? 'We love you, but the money goes to our/your foes?'

Seriously.

[Teho]

How about, in a few years, Open Source friendly companies having kick-ass drivers and hostile companies having bad/mediocare drivers.
How's that for an example?

That's going to happen with or without support. We are not talking about hiring team of open source developers to work fulltime on Nouveau but sponsoring a few.

What message are we now sending to our friends? 'We love you, but the money goes to our/your foes?'

The money isn't going to NVIDIA... are you saying that these students that are developing open source software are our enemies? You can't in you right mind be serious.

[89c51]

Even thought i find it nice the nouveau gets support i would prefer it if those money were given to state trackers or something like that.

Also apart from EVoC X.org, freedesktop and the other foundations should start something like an FOSS infrastructure Kickstarter (ie name it Codestarter). People decide which features should be implemented/prioritized and donate to hire a dev or two. The basic infrastructure for FOSS Operating systems needs money.

[AnonymousCoward]

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.

Were there any proposals for AMD/ATI power management that were rejected in favour of Nouveau? Without knowing that, you can't say that funding Nouveau was prioritized.

[entropy]

Were there any proposals for AMD/ATI power management that were rejected in favour of Nouveau? Without knowing that, you can't say that funding Nouveau was prioritized.

Fair point. I don't know.

Is there a listing of all proposals and which had been eventually accepted?

[not.sure]

Slow down, guys.
RTFA! The message quoted clearly explains that the problem with modern nvidia GPUs is the extremely low default frequencies. So low that it's not even good enough for a modern (=overblown) desktop environment. And it's likely getting worse with newer architectures. As much as we all hate nvidia, we can't ignore that.

[uid313]

Nvidia are assholes who refuse to support open source device drivers.
But Nvidia cards work the best, the nouvou drivers are okay and the proprietary drivers are great (except lack of kernel mode setting).

AMD is lazy and cant get out Catalyst drivers in time when there is a new X.org release. The result is that many distributions ship an old version of X.org because AMD is holding everyone back by being slow with the Catalyst drivers.

Latest Nvidia and AMD cards both suck with the open source drivers.

Meanwhile Intel is contributing the most to X.org and Wayland. Intel have open source device drivers with hardware support out even before the hardware is out.

I won't buy AMD or Nvidia. Next time I'm going with Intel instead.