Nouveau Companion 32

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Nouveau Companion 32

To end off the year, the developers behind the open-source 2D/3D NVIDIA driver known as Nouveau have an update on their recent progress. This issue of the Nouveau Companion covers the RandR 1.2 improvements, GPU overclocking possibilities through Nouveau, and a Gallium3D driver for NVIDIA NV4x and NV5x hardware. However, before jumping out of your seat with joy, this Gallium3D driver has much work ahead. Google Earth and Quake 3 are running with the Gallium3D Nouveau driver, but it's not rendering correctly as you can see from the screenshots. Nevertheless, this is a great open-source achievement.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=11608

[yoshi314]

wow they are moving on very quickly.

i guess nouveau has more developers and gets much more attention, which is kind of a paradox - nvidia is pretty well supported on linux, so the demand for the accelerated opensource driver wouldn't seem to be that high.

on the other hand - ati's drivers really do suck, and development of the opensource drivers doesn't move that quickly. but it's not stalled either. am i missing something here?

[Regenwald]

can someone please tell me something about the actual state of gallium3d and dri2? when will there be first apha-versions?

thanks

[yoshi314]

i think the alpha is already there. but not many drivers have been ported to gallium yet. there was proof-of-concept intel driver [i believe] and now nouveau, the other drivers are in progress.

gallium codebase is still in flux, so the developers have to constantly adjust their drivers to it and, well, develop them :]

so i guess when gallium gets ready + a couple of more months for the drivers to get ported.

[DeepDayze]

I see this is pretty darned good progress indeed. Nvidia users should have something like what radeonhd is to the ATI people.

[Mithrandir]

Originally Posted by DeepDayze

I see this is pretty darned good progress indeed. Nvidia users should have something like what radeonhd is to the ATI people.

However, radeonhd should be finished sooner.

[yoshi314]

Nvidia users should have something like what radeonhd is to the ATI people.

i think they already have something better at the moment - i mean, the driver provides some 2d acceleration and preliminary 3d on some chips.

maybe nvidia hw is much easier to reverse engineer?

[Kano]

This driver could be interesting for Xbox as there was never a binary driver for that. Also PS3 would be interesting...

[yoshi314]

ps3 people (sony) are control-crazy. they give people opportunity to run linux on their hardware, and at the same time they restrict them.

ps3 is a neat piece of hardware, due to cell. but the restrictions they impose everywhere are simply ridiculous.

think back how hard it is/was to run linux on the ps2 - no cd access, no support for 3rd party distributions etc. and the 3d acceleration was locked as well. fortunately ps2 did not have firmware upgrade option, and some people have managed to get around that.

with ps3 sony will constantly block every new attempt to circumvent the hypervisor by releasing an firmware upgrade.

they might seem to be linux friendly, but that's just for show imho with the way they lock down their hardware.

that's mainly to prevent people who might develop linux based games for ps3 that would not go through their hands (as you need to buy a licence from sony to make games for their consoles).

that's why i believe nouveau for ps3 is doomed to fail. unless sony changes its mind (which is unlikely).

[mlau]

Originally Posted by yoshi314

ps3 people (sony) are control-crazy. they give people opportunity to run linux on their hardware, and at the same time they restrict them.

The sole reason for doing that was to take hackers a reason to look for flaws
in sw/hw security. Quite an ingenious move by sony: most hackers are concentrating on the xbox2 and the wii, because there's more prestige in
getting linux to run on those systems right now.