Nouveau: X Render, RandR 1.2, FB, KMS Suspend Done

[89c51]

Originally Posted by RahulSundaram

When users buy hardware, they don't necessarily but it with Linux in mind. Also, Nouveau is already way more advanced that the Nv driver it replaces. To give you an idea of a similar thing, think about Pidgin. Pretty much all the protocols it supports has been reverse engineered without any documentation. Ideally you would only be using things like Jabber/XMPP but in the real world but support for all those proprietary protocols in Pidgin has of course enormously benefited us. So has support for proprietary protocol in Samba and a proprietary documentation format in OpenOffice.org. Nouveau is very similar. The combined support of Intel and ATI with documentation and code along with the pressure of a reverse engineered driver getting more and more features will hopefully get Nvidia to change their minds. There are many good examples of this. Java going GPL is a recent case.

i always had the impression that reverse engineering HW is by far more difficult than reverse engineering SW

anyway

[chithanh]

Originally Posted by nightmorph

I just hope it'll support GeForce 8200 GPUs, like the one built into my motherboard, an Asus M3N78-VM.

The nouveau driver already more or less works with GeForce 8200/8300, as long as you use KMS. There is an open bug regarding those chipsets, but I think the information in there is not fully up to date.

[nightmorph]

Originally Posted by chithanh

The nouveau driver already more or less works with GeForce 8200/8300, as long as you use KMS. There is an open bug regarding those chipsets, but I think the information in there is not fully up to date.

Thanks for the links, much appreciated. I may have to post to the bug after finding out what they're looking for. Long as it won't nuke my hardware, I'm up to the challenge.