State of Nouveau?

[sreyan]

Last time we had an update on Nouveau we were told that marchieu was searching for a new job, and Koala_BR was busy with life. The nouveau page suggests that the project is alive and well.

It would be great to learn some stuff about what the nouveau team has been up to. Is there any chance we might see 2d portions of nouveau merged back into nv?

I'd also be interested in seeing what other projects have used mmiotrace since it's been merged to the mainline kernel.

[Eragon]

Well the page says:

"2D-support is in fairly good shape with EXA acceleration, Xv and Randr12 (think of dual-head, rotations, etc.). Randr12 should work for all cards up to, but not including, Geforce 8000 series. Randr12 is now the default. Any 3D functionality that might exist is still unsupported, do not ask for instructions to try it. Also, VT switching while X is running is considered lucky. We keep a status matrix and a TODO list. "

Sounds promising, tough I will never install a 2d only-driver just because it's open source. I won't use nouveau 'till it offers just as fast (or faster offcourse ) and stable 3d performance as nvidia's binary driver, and there are packages for it so I don't have to compile it from source, which is something I am not willing to do if the, altough closed source, alternative is simply... :

sudo apt-get install nvidia-glx-new

... and it works just as good.

[Eragon]

They do say tough that it is going to be "very problematic" to support GeForce 8 cards, which sucks because I have a 512 MB GeForce 8600 GT

I couldn't even do a renouveau dump because that only works on cards with max 256 MB memory.

[sreyan]

Well I'd be great to see these drivers in new distros so people aren't left out in the cold by Nvidia's unwillingness to move drivers to newer versions of X.

[pq__]

Originally Posted by sreyan

Is there any chance we might see 2d portions of nouveau merged back into nv?

I'd also be interested in seeing what other projects have used mmiotrace since it's been merged to the mainline kernel.

It is very unlikely to merge anything from Nouveau to nv:
- nv is maintained by Nvidia
- Nouveau is using a different architecture
- Mode setting is going into the kernel in the future
- Why would you do that?

I'd like to know, too, what other projects are using mmiotrace ;-)
I know madwifi used to do something.

[Linuxhippy]

I tried my XRender Java2D pipeline some time ago on a GeForce6600 and 2D accaleration worked very well.