Nouveau News Archives

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.

As a quick PSA, while you may be wanting to try out DRI3 support with the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver as it is capable of enhancing the performance, so far my latest attempts have been marred by rendering issues.

While I'm in the middle of a big Nouveau Linux 4.4 vs. Nouveau Linux 4.5 vs. NVIDIA proprietary driver comparison with multiple NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards, I just wanted to pass along a bit of good, non-performance news about Nouveau on Linux 4.5.

Karol Herbst has published a set of patches for implementing PMU engine counters, which will be needed for supporting dynamic re-clocking with newer GPUs.

With yesterday's NVIDIA GeForce GT 710 Linux testing was just the start of our tests for this sub-$50 USD graphics card powered by a cut-down Kepler GPU. Yesterday's article just included some basic NVIDIA binary driver tests while today's article includes Nouveau performance figures.

With the upcoming Linux 4.5 kernel, the process of manually re-clocking your NVIDIA graphics card using the open-source NVIDIA driver is slightly different compared to previous kernels.

Samuel Pitoiset has published a set of twelve patches for implementing compute shaders support within the Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver for the GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" graphics processors.

Just a few days ago I was writing about OpenGL 4.4's Query Buffer Object Support Appears Nearly Ready For Nouveau and as of last night that code is now in Mesa Git.

While the Nouveau NVC0 and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers were tied for a while in terms of their OpenGL 4 extension coverage, the NVC0 driver for NVIDIA Fermi GPUs and newer has advanced further with two more extensions -- one for OpenGL 4.2 and the other for OpenGL 4.3 -- now being supported by this open-source, reverse-engineered driver.

Hans de Goede of Red Hat and Pierre Moreau, an independent Nouveau contributor, are speaking at FOSDEM's graphics development room tomorrow about compute support for Nouveau.

Samuel Pitoiset sent out a set of 17 patches today that add the core of the compute shaders support to the Mesa state tracker as needed by Gallium3D drivers.

Karol Herbst, the independent open-source developer who has been focusing upon Nouveau re-clocking support in recent months, has made a new proposal and patch series concerning NVIDIA GeForce GTX 400/500 "Fermi" re-clocking on this open-source driver.

While it was looking like Nouveau might not have any big updates for Linux 4.5, a last-minute pull request was honored for DRM-Next that will provide some new/improved functionality to this open-source NVIDIA Linux kernel driver.

Ilia Mirkin has landed some more notable feature code into Mesa this evening.

With the Linux 4.2 kernel there was no feature update for Nouveau and it's looking like it might be that way too for Linux 4.5.

For the past few months a Samsung developer has been working on VA-API support for Nouveau. After a few patch revisions, that work is finally hitting mainline Mesa.

Support for altering the PCI Express speed with the Nouveau DRM driver is still being worked on for improving the open-source NVIDIA driver's performance.

The open-source Nouveau driver has hooked up support for OpenGL's relatively new ARB_shader_draw_parameters extension.

Following the latest Mesa and libdrm patches last week for allowing the Nouveau Gallium3D code to take advantage of the Nouveau DRM kernel driver's new interfaces, that work has now landed.

Prolific Nouveau contributor Ilia Mirkin has published a Gallium3D driver patch for implementing ETC2 and ASTC support on hardware supporting these texture compression methods.

Ben Skeggs has posted the latest revision of his libdrm and Mesa patch series for making use of the new "NVIF" kernel interface for the Nouveau DRM driver.

For the past few months a developer at Samsung has been working on VA-API support for the Nouveau Gallium3D driver. Those patches today are up to their fifth revision.

Ben Skeggs went ahead today and tagged version 1.0.12 of the Nouveau X.Org display driver.

Samuel Pitoiset who for years now has been working on the Nouveau driver and its performance counters support to be exact, has landed improved performance metrics handling for GeForce GTX 600/700 "Kepler" graphics cards.

Karol Herbst has sent out the latest version of his patches to further stabilize the re-clocking of GeForce 600/700 "Kepler" graphics cards.

Red Hat developer Hans de Goede was tasked earlier this year with working on the Nouveau driver for bettering the open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver. His latest focus has been on an LLVM TGSI back-end.

Just one week after Mesa Git received Nouveau NVC0 compute support, the NV50 Gallium3D driver for pre-Fermi GPUs has also received basic compute support.

The open-source Nouveau Gallium3D drivers have tacked on support for another OpenGL 4.4 extension.

For a number of months now there's been several NVIDIA developers working on improving the open-source Nouveau driver particularly around the Tegra series.

David Airlie has pulled the Nouveau DRM driver changes into his DRM-Next tree, which will then end up in Linux 4.4 within the next few days.

Following AMD adding ARB_copy_image support to the RadeonSI driver, Nouveau's NV50 and NVC0 Gallium3D drivers have now been wired up for this OpenGL extension.

Back in July I wrote about someone working on a SPIR-V to NV50 IR Nouveau translator so that this intermediate representation for Vulkan and OpenCL 2.1+ could then be fed into this open-source NVIDIA driver. A brief, indirect update was shared this weekend and so far it appears the work is progressing slowly.

Samuel Pitoiset has published a new set of sixteen patches for improving the MP counters support for NVIDIA GeForce GTX 400/500 "Fermi" graphics processors.

Last month I wrote about an experimental Nouveau code branch that offered better GDDR5 Kepler re-clocking support. For some, this branch allows Nouveau users to finally fully re-clock their GeForce GTX 600/700 series graphics cards. Those patches are now being offered up for mainline Nouveau.

Ben Skeggs at Red Hat has started queuing up the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver patches that are being aimed for the Linux 4.4 kernel.

Roy Spliet has just published his latest work to better handle re-clocking for select NVIDIA GPUs with the open-source Nouveau driver.

Samuel Pitoiset for the past few years has been on what seems like a one-man mission to implement NVIDIA's hardware performance counters inside the open-source Nouveau driver. He continues making much progress and it's starting to become a reality for developers who wish to profile their apps/workloads with Nouveau under Linux.

Besides AMD talking about their Vulkan Linux driver and other AMDGPU driver plans, an update on the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver was shared today at XDC2015.

If you've been reading Phoronix any length of time for open-source graphics news, you'll know the most difficult challenge facing open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver developers is the re-clocking / power management situation. It's been slow and re-clocking still leaves a lot to be desired.

In his spare time outside of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center, Martin Peres has been working on a few improvements to the Nouveau DRM driver when it comes to voltage controls.

A few days ago I wrote about the open-source NVIDIA kernel driver going through a big rework and now that code has been queued up into DRM-Next for Linux 4.3.

While the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver has supported Gallium3D's VDPAU state tracker, there is a new set of patches for also being able to benefit from the VA-API state tracker for video acceleration.

While Linux 4.2 isn't bringing any notable Nouveau changes, it looks like for Linux 4.3 there could be quite a heavy rework of the Nouveau DRM driver landing that consists of hundreds of patches to this open-source NVIDIA graphics driver.

The latest work that NVIDIA's been working on for the open-source Nouveau driver is to enable VIC support.

Patches are pending to remove GLAMOR support from the xf86-video-nouveau DDX driver and as a result to also drop the Maxwell hardware support.

On the heels of the fresh open-source AMD Linux driver tests with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2, here are some numbers for these Steam Linux games on the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) graphics driver.

While there is already an Intel Vulkan Linux graphics driver developed by Valve and LunarG that will be open-sourced as soon as the Vulkan specification is officially out, we haven't heard much about the other open-source Linux graphics drivers trying to get a jump start on Vulkan / SPIR-V support.

For developers that may be experienced with advanced C/C++ programming, dealing with graphics drivers is a very different beast, and thus for individuals wanting to get involved there are often lots of questions simply about how to get started.