With Intel Kabylake graphics on Mesa working (albeit very slowly) for Aspyr Media's latest Linux game port, Civilization VI, and RadeonSI Gallium3D running too albeit at a less than desirable speed, I decided to try running the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver with this latest AAA Linux game release.
Nouveau News Archives
485 Nouveau open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.
Ilia Mirkin's weekend hacking on the Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver has led to ARB_gpu_shader_int64 support coming for this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver.
Ben Skeggs at Red Hat has begun aligning the latest Nouveau DRM patches that in turn will be submitted to DRM-Next for the Linux 4.11 kernel merge window.
Nouveau continues advancing on the display front: beyond getting DP MST and atomic mode-setting support in the Linux 4.10 kernel, there are now patches available for wiring this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver up to supporting stereoscopic 3D output via HDMI.
With the recent news over the Nouveau Maxwell performance improvements and reaching OpenGL 4.3, among other milestones for this community-driven, open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver, you may be wondering what else is on the road-map for this driver.
There is some very exciting Nouveau news just ahead of Christmas if you are interested in this open-source NVIDIA driver on Maxwell graphics cards.
Overall the Nouveau DRM updates for Linux 4.10 are significant after they missed out on any feature changes for Linux 4.9. Given all the churn, there's been a last minute pull into DRM-Next of some more fixes and other minor activity.
NVIDIA developer Alexandre Courbot has sent out his latest version of Nouveau DRM patches to carry out Secure Boot refactoring of the code for dealing with NVIDIA's signed firmware requirements for Maxwell GPUs and newer. But these latest patches come with a bit of a twist.
Samuel Pitoiset, one of the few significant contributors to the open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics stack particularly when it comes to the area of performance counters, has now enabled MP performance counters in the NVC0 Gallium3D driver for NVIDIA GTX 750/900 series Maxwell hardware.
Ben Skeggs of Red Hat has added initial support for the GP102 Pascal GPU to the Nouveau DRM driver.
Last week Nouveau DRM maintainer Ben Skeggs posted the initial atomic mode-setting patches for early testing of all this new KMS code. That code is indeed going to make it for Linux 4.10 with that work being pulled in overnight to DRM-Next.
A few days ago I wrote about Nouveau atomic mode-setting and DP MST patches while now DRM subsystem maintainer Ben Skeggs is soliciting more testing from the open-source NVIDIA community for trying these big changes to the Nouveau KMS driver.
We've known Nouveau DRM maintainer Ben Skeggs of Red Hat has been working on atomic mode-setting and DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport (DP MST) for this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver as that what led to Nouveau having no feature additions for Linux 4.9. Some of this code is now having the Nouveau kernel development tree.
With Linux 4.9 there is unfortunately no new feature code for Nouveau due to being late to merge the new functionality, but that work that missed 4.9 is now staged in DRM-Next for merging to mainline when the Linux 4.10 merge window rolls along.
The Nouveau DDX X.Org driver, xf86-video-nouveau, hasn't supported NVIDIA's GTX 750/900 Maxwell graphics processors even though there's been the reverse-engineered, open-source support within the Nouveau DRM kernel driver and NVC0 Gallium3D Mesa driver. Patches revised today implement Maxwell support for the X.Org driver.
It's not as important as NVIDIA publishing new signed firmware images, but then again it's not every day we see NVIDIA developers contribute to the open-source Nouveau driver stack. Nevertheless, today a new set of patches were published for the Nouveau DRM driver.
Thanks to the ongoing compute-focused work by independent Nouveau contributor Samuel Pitoiset, the NVC0 Gallium3D driver is the first driver in Mesa supporting the ARB_compute_variable_group_size extension.
In addition to the Nouveau status update talk at XDC2016, Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst had carried out an additional presentation on Friday dedicated to this open-source NVIDIA driver's work on power management and re-clocking.
Besides Nouveau developers being frustrated by NVIDIA's signed firmware blobs, at XDC2016 they also made other remarks about their focus on OpenGL and performance while Vulkan support isn't expected anytime soon.
The latest stable release of the Nouveau X.Org driver is now available for users of this open-source NVIDIA DDX component in conjunction with the Nouveau DRM kernel driver.
Nouveau developers Samuel Pitoiset, Karol Herbst, Pierre Moreau, and Martin Peres presented their status update on this open-source, reverse-engineered NVIDIA Linux graphics driver during the second day of the XDC2016 conference. Nouveau developers had a few words for the NVIDIA developers in the room.
Great news for users of the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" graphics driver: the long-awaited boost patches are now queued up to land with Linux 4.9.
For those with a TITAN X or other high-end GPUs that have a configurable light-up "GeForce" LED sign along the edge of the graphics card, a new Nouveau driver allows manipulating those LEDs.
Independent Nouveau developer Karol Herbst continues to be hard at work on improving the re-clocking state of the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver stack.
Samuel Pitoiset continues being one of the most prolific Nouveau driver developers in recent times and today posted support for OpenGL tessellation on NVIDIA Maxwell GPUs and newer.
In addition to the GeForce GTX 900 "Maxwell" open-source driver support on Nouveau being in rough shape due to lack of re-clocking / power management for allowing sufficient performance, the NVC0 Gallium3D driver for Maxwell has also lagged behind with some OpenGL 4.x features on the GTX 900 GPUs.
The Nouveau open-source NVIDIA DRM driver changes have been queued in DRM-Next for the Linux 4.8 kernel.
While there isn't yet any 3D/hardware acceleration support, the first milestone of open-source bring-up for the latest-generation NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1000 "Pascal" graphics processors is now available for Nouveau.
For users of Nouveau's NVC0 Gallium3D driver with a GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" graphics card, there is now OpenGL 4.2 compliance.
We've already covered at length the many AMDGPU/Radeon changes, the usual Intel DRM churn, and the multiple new DRM drivers coming for Linux 4.7. Missing from our coverage has been the Nouveau driver, but that work is finally getting queued up for this next kernel version.
Samuel Pitoiset's patches take the Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver's support up to OpenGL 4.2 for GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" graphics cards.
Prolific Nouveau contributor Samuel Pitoiset has now enabled compute support by default for NVIDIA GK110 GPUs and newer.
It's an exciting day for users of Nouveau, the open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics stack, assuming you have a GK104 or GK110 GPU.
Karol Herbst has sent out his latest set of 37 patches for trying to improve volting and clocking on NVIDIA GeForce 400 "Fermi" GPUs and newer.
If you have a NVIDIA GeForce 600/700 "Kepler" graphics card and wish to help out the Nouveau driver developers by testing out the experimental "boost" re-clocking patches covered yesterday on Phoronix thanks to the work by Karol Herbst, here's a 4.5-based Ubuntu kernel build to try out this weekend.
As a result of comments made on the recent Intel's Unreleased 3.0 X.Org Driver Gets More Fixes For DRI3/Present article, a reader inquired to the Nouveau developers about the X.Org DDX driver options for open-source NVIDIA users on Linux.
With the exception of the GK110 graphics processor, NVIDIA's Kepler and Maxwell GPUs now support OpenGL compute shaders (GL_ARB_compute_shader) with the latest Nouveau driver code in Mesa.
With yesterday's Nouveau Kepler vs. Maxwell Performance On Linux 4.6 + Mesa 11.3-dev benchmarks, a number of Phoronix readers expressed their surprise how well the GeForce 600/700 "Kepler" series hardware was performing on the open-source Nouveau driver once manually re-clocking these graphics cards. It's certainly much better than the GTX 900 series performance on Nouveau as the Maxwell GPUs don't have any re-clocking support on Nouveau at all. I'm working on some fresh Nouveau vs. NVIDIA Kepler tests and for one Steam Linux game, this reverse-engineered NVIDIA open-source driver is able to beat out the "binary blob" from NVIDIA.
While it won't help the current GTX 900 Maxwell performance situation on Nouveau due to being blocked on the PMU firmware in order to be able to re-clock these latest-generation GPUs, there's a fresh kernel source tree that's easy to build with experimental Nouveau patches for improving the NVIDIA re-clocking support on this open-source driver.
Now that everything has been mainlined concerning the GeForce GTX 900 "Maxwell" support in the open-source Nouveau driver, it's relatively easy getting the hardware acceleration with OpenGL support running on this community-based, reverse-engineered Linux graphics driver.
The Nouveau driver updates for the Linux 4.6 merge window were staged on Sunday into the DRM-Next tree.
Samuel Pitoiset has been continuing in his performance counters / compute support quest for the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver. Samuel's latest accomplishment is landing MP performance counters for the GK110 GPUs.
Samuel Pitoiset continues carrying out compute miracles for the open-source Nouveau NVIDIA Linux graphics driver stack.
Just last week NVIDIA finally released the signed firmware files for the GTX 900 "Maxwell" GPUs to finally allow open-source 3D driver support on these latest-generation processors. Those firmware blobs are now living in linux-firmware.git so that they can be easily distributed.
Samuel Pitoiset has landed his latest Mesa/Gallium3D work concerning compute shaders.
Samuel Pitoiset has been leading the charge of Gallium3D compute support and his latest add to mainline Mesa ahead of the 11.2 branching is GM107 compute support.
The Nouveau development crew continues to amaze with their accomplishments with what they can achieve when not being blocked by signed firmware issues or other major road-blockers.
Less than 24 hours after NVIDIA finally posted the signed firmware images for the GTX 900 "Maxwell" GPUs, Nouveau developers have succeeded in already getting 3D games running on their open-source driver stack.
It's been another exciting weekend of Mesa development activity by the independent developers working on the Nouveau driver for open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics support.
While all routine Phoronix readers should be well aware of the fact that there still isn't any open-source accelerated support for the GTX 900 "Maxwell" graphics cards yet as the Nouveau developers are blocked on waiting signed firmware from NVIDIA, the GTX 750 series does have some basic support as the original Maxwell GPUs. Here is a look at using this unofficial open-source driver on a GTX 750 with the Linux 4.5 kernel and Mesa 11.2-devel.
485 Nouveau news articles published on Phoronix.