OpenSUSE 42.2 RC2 Released, Disables Nouveau 3D Support By Default

Written by Michael Larabel in SUSE on 2 November 2016 at 05:51 PM EDT. 11 Comments
SUSE
The second and final release candidate of openSUSE 42.2 Leap is now available for last-minute testing ahead of the official Linux distribution release later this month.

Interestingly, one of the last-minute changes for openSUSE 42.2 is that it no longer ships with the Nouveau Mesa/Gallium3D support by default. This change was done since "KDE crashes with it on some NVidia cards" and "some third-party Qt applications may no longer start." Some bugs about Nouveau KDE woes are here and here.

OpenSUSE 42.2 will stick to using Nouveau KMS and the xf86-video-nouveau DDX driver, but it no longer enables the Gallium3D NV50/NVC0 drivers as part of the default build. If you want to use Nouveau, you need to manually install the Mesa-dri-nouveau package. Besides missing out on 3D, Kepler GPUs and newer will also lose out on 2D acceleration since that's accelerated via GLAMOR and thus necessitates a working a OpenGL driver. Of course, you can also switch from Nouveau to using the NVIDIA proprietary driver if wanting fast performance and full OpenGL/OpenCL/CUDA/VDPAU support.

Disabling Nouveau by default is one of the most user-facing changes of openSUSE 42.2 RC2 but there is also various package updates and other preparations for openSUSE 42.2 to premiere later this month. More details via news.opensuse.org. The 42.2 Leap release is expected on 16 November.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week