Nouveau Companion 42

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Nouveau Companion 42

The 42nd edition of the Nouveau Companion is now available to provide an update on the status of this community project to provide an open-source 2D/3D driver for all of NVIDIA's graphics hardware. Covered in this developer update is the status of the Nouveau driver on newer NVIDIA hardware, work underway on NV20 Gallium3D code, the LLVM back-end for Gallium3D progressing, the work that's left on kernel mode-setting support, and the GEM / TTM memory management work. The lack of a stabilized memory manager for the Nouveau kernel mode-setting driver is what's postponing a stable 2D driver release.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=13400

[bugmenot]

Nice to see that it goes forward. The completely free desktop is getting more real every month.

Thanks to all you great devs!

[[Knuckles]]

Looking forward to having a stable nouveau release supporting the crapload of old nvidia cards I still have

[Louise]

An important news first: Darktama was hired by Red Hat Australia, moved to Brisbane and started working full time on X.Org and Nouveau. Congratulations to him!

It will be very interesting to hear what RedHat have of secret plans with him =)

If I remember correctly, RH's primary interest in open source Radeon drivers was KMS, because they have a customer that demanded that.

I bet it was OLPC =)

[airlied]

We don't have any secret plans :-)

Ben has been hired to fill a vacancy left by a departure in our RHEL X support team. We decided we needed someone to handle nvidia related issues amongst other things. We do a lot of internal RHEL support work and backporting on X.org drivers, and we kinda wanted someone to take over the -nv work.

However when he isn't working on RHEL, we've asked he try to achieve an, as supportable as possible + shippable memory managed, kernel modesetting, 2D + 3D accelerated nouveau driver, for at least nv50 and up. We are interested in nv40 as a secondary goal, and anything before that we don't hold much hope for caring about, but maybe.

[airlied]

Originally Posted by Louise

It will be very interesting to hear what RedHat have of secret plans with him =)

If I remember correctly, RH's primary interest in open source Radeon drivers was KMS, because they have a customer that demanded that.

I bet it was OLPC =)

Oh we don't have any single customer demand for it, we just have feedback from numerous customers who wanted Linux to be a better and flashier desktop OS. The two things noted were smooth booting with 0 transitions and a composited desktop environment. KMS + plymouth are part of the first effort, DRI2 is part of our investment in the second (instead of turning on compiz by default, and recommending people run binary drivers).

These are pretty substantial changes, and I'm glad that Red Hat gave me the chance to take KMS from the my pre-RH hacking to the upstream position it is in today.

I think working on drivers that aren't memory managed + kernel based is a waste of time and effort at this point, and hope we can drop user modesetting as soon as possible. (granted I'll be dealing with userspace for 7 years of RHEL anyhow).

Dave.