Nouveau News Archives

Samuel Pitoiset has continued reverse-engineering NVIDIA's hardware performance counters and implementing them for use under Linux by the open-source Nouveau driver. His latest "RFC" patches are for exposing the NV50 global performance counters.

Samuel Pitoiset has continued on his quest of implementing NVIDIA hardware counters support and exposing it to user-space within the Nouveau open-source driver stack.

Samuel Pitoiset today unveiled his long sought after patches for implementing NVIDIA's PerfKit performance utility as a Gallium3D state tracker for use by the open-source Linux graphics drivers.

Red Hat is letting another one of their developers focus on improvements to Nouveau, the open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver.

Thanks to work by Samuel Pitoiset, NVIDIA's hardware performance counters of their recent GPU generations are now being exposed through the open-source Nouveau Linux graphics driver.

While the Nouveau developers remain blocked by NVIDIA on bringing up accelerated support for the GeForce GTX 900 series, with the forthcoming Linux 4.1 kernel there is initial GeForce GTX 750 "Maxwell" accelerated support out-of-the-box.

While the GeForce GTX 900 series are in garbage shape with the open-source driver, Nouveau on Linux 4.1 does bring some improvements for the original Maxwell GeForce GTX 750 series along with the GK20A Tegra K1 graphics processors.

While NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 900 series is dominating for Linux gamers with excellent performance with their $1000+ GPU as well as great Linux OpenGL/OpenCL performance out of their lower-cost GPUs with excellent power efficiency, that's only when using the proprietary driver... NVIDIA's newer GTX 900 / Maxwell hardware is less open-source friendly than their previous generations of hardware.

Nouveau (NVC0) Gallium3D now supports the GL_ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 extension. What's exciting about this enablement is that it's a feature for OpenGL 4.0 / GLSL 4.00 compliance and this Nouveau driver support is beating out the Intel and Radeon drivers in providing this OpenGL capability.

While the Nouveau pull request has yet to be issued for the DRM-Next merge window that will ultimately target the Linux 3.20 kernel, a look at the changes so far appear to mostly indicate this open-source NVIDIA driver is just going through a period of code cleaning and reorganization.

This weekend I got around to trying out the GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980 "Maxwell" graphics cards with the Linux 3.19 kernel now that there's initial support for these new GPUs via the open-source Nouveau DRM driver.

A batch of Nouveau commits have landed in mainline Mesa.

A NVIDIA engineer has sent out eleven new patches for the open-source Nouveau graphics driver just in time for Christmas.

NVIDIA has updated some of their public specifications to help Nouveau developers in enabling support for their latest generation Maxwell hardware.

With David Airlie continuing to close the drm-next merge window early prior to the official N-1 kernel release, the open-source NVIDIA/Nouveau driver changes have now landed in Git.

Contributions to open-source projects don't begin and end with code.

The Nouveau DDX driver now supports the Direct Rendering Infrastructure 3 when using its traditional EXA-based acceleration rather than only with GLAMOR.

Samuel Pitoiset has been working hard to reverse-engineer NVIDIA's hardware performance counters of their GPU and to allow them to be taken to their full potential under the open-source Nouveau Linux graphics driver.

Student developer Roy Spliet presented at XDC2014 Bordeaux this week about his X.Org Foundation funded work on improving GPU re-clocking for the open-source Nouveau (NVIDIA) Linux graphics driver. For NVA3/NVA5/NVA8 hardware owners, the reverse-engineered driver will soon start offering better performance with the GPU core and memory frequencies finally able to hit their rated targets.

Roy Spliet, the student developer behind funded by the X.Org Foundation to work on Nouveau re-clocking, continues making great progress on this critical feature for the open-source NVIDIA graphics driver. With the latest patches, DDR2 / DDR3 / GDDR3 memory re-clocking should be working for a lot more NVIDIA graphics cards.

To the dismay of open-source fans, NVIDIA is tightening the belt so to speak around their GPU hardware: with Maxwell and future hardware, certain aspects of the NVIDIA graphics processor chip will only be available to the "Falcon" (a.k.a. "FUC") firmware images that have been signed by NVIDIA. While this will throw a wrench at Nouveau's open-source effort, NVIDIA at least informed Nouveau and are jointly working towards an adequate solution.

Ben Skeggs sent in his Nouveau DRM driver changes for the drm-next tree of open-source NVIDIA driver improvements that will land in Linux 3.18.

While the Maxwell-based GTX 900 series graphics cards are rumored to be launching in the weeks ahead, the GTX 750 Maxwell graphics cards on the open-source "Nouveau" Linux driver still need some more work before they'll play nicely when not using NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver.

Roy Spliet has been one of the few open-source developers working to tackle re-clocking support for Nouveau so that this open-source, reverse-engineered NVIDIA Linux graphics driver can better perform. He's already published several sets of patches improving various bits of GPU re-clocking through this work that's being funded by the X.Org Foundation. Today he's published another patch series.

Roy Spliet is at it again with a new set of Nouveau DRM driver patches pertaining to re-clocking.

The Nouveau development community released the xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.11 driver update to kick off the start of September. While you wouldn't guess it from the version number, this driver update is actually very significant and introduces a lot of new functionality and other improvements.

If you are trying to re-clock your NVIDIA GPU with the Nouveau driver when using the Linux 3.17 kernel, there's an extra step involved, but still your mileage may vary and the re-clocking is still mostly for Kepler GPUs.

For those following my Linux driver tribulations with constantly trying out and benchmarking the latest Git code for the Intel, Radeon, and NVIDIA/Nouveau drivers, the Nouveau screen corruption problem noted earlier this week has been resolved.

This week I've been running a large open-source graphics card comparison using Mesa 10.3-devel and Linux 3.17 from Git. While the intentions were nice with featuring Intel/NVIDIA/AMD graphics, running several benchmarks of Steam / Source Engine games on Linux, and also measuring the power efficiency and thermal performance, the testing was cut short when it came to the Nouveau driver testing.

Users of some pre-Fermi NVIDIA graphics cards can be thankful to Roy Spliet for managing some re-clocking related improvements to the Nouveau driver.

Nouveau developer Martin Peres has published a set of ten Nouveau DRM patches working towards proper fan/power management support for NVIDIA's latest "Maxwell" GPUs.

Samuel Pitoiset continues making steady, great progress on his Google Summer of Code project as a student developer reverse-engineering and implementing NVIDIA hardware performance counters within the open-source Nouveau driver.

Being merged into the mainline kernel code-base for Linux 3.17 was the big DRM feature pull that included enhancements to the Intel and AMD Radeon graphics drivers (among the other smaller DRM/KMS drivers), but missing from action was the open-source NVIDIA driver. The Nouveau driver changes were delayed by some last-minute bug-hunting but now a separate pull request was issued to land the Nouveau driver updates for Linux 3.17.

In complementing the Nouveau vs. NVIDIA OpenGL benchmark results published earlier this week on Phoronix, here are the power consumption and performance-per-Watt metrics.

As a follow on from today's Nouveau vs. NVIDIA OpenGL driver benchmarking results that were published earlier today on Phoronix, in the comments an interesting video was pointed out of Grand Theft Auto IV using Direct3D 9.x natively under Linux.

Samuel Pitoiset has shared another blog post on his excellent work for reverse-engineering NVIDIA hardware performance counters and implementing the functionality within the open-source Nouveau driver.

Nouveau's NVC0 Gallium3D driver for supporting NVIDIA "Fermi" hardware and newer has picked up support for indirect drawing.

One of the biggest challenges with the Nouveau open-source graphics driver for NVIDIA graphics hardware in recent times has been with regard to GPU / video memory re-clocking. As a minor step forward, NVIDIA has contributed re-clocking patches for the GK20A graphics processor.

While two X.Org GSoC projects already failed this summer, student developer Samuel Pitoiset continues making great progress on his work for implementing performance counter support within the open-source Nouveau NVIDIA graphics driver.

The work by open-source student developer Samuel Pitoiset taking part again in Google's Summer of Code is continuing to show signs of progress. Pitoiset is the one that's been working towards an open-source version of NVIDIA's NVPerfKit with exposing NVIDIA's performance counters on Linux using the open-source Nouveau driver.

In trying to reduce tearing and match the behavior of the Intel and Radeon drivers, the Nouveau X.Org driver will now sync buffer-swaps to vblanks by default.

As part of the this year's Google Summer of Code, a returning Nouveau developer is working on open-source, reverse-engineered performance counters support for NVIDIA graphics hardware that's implemented within the Nouveau driver stack and exposed to user-space in a similar manner to NVIDIA's NvPerfKit.

One day after the open-source Nouveau X.Org driver gained support for GLAMOR acceleration and the NVIDIA "Maxwell" hardware, the latest addition to xf86-video-nouveau is enabling support for the X.Org PRESENT extension.

The Nouveau X.Org driver (xf86-video-nouveau) now has basic support for NVIDIA's newest Maxwell graphics processor. Related to that, there's also GLAMOR 2D acceleration support available within the Nouveau DDX.

The latest OpenGL 4 extension being enabled for the Nouveau "NVC0" Gallium3D driver is GL_ARB_viewport_array.

The X.Org Foundation has decided to fund an Endless Vacation of Code project to improve the support for the Nouveau driver's re-clocking of several generations of NVIDIA GPUs.

The open-source driver stack for NVIDIA's Tegra K1 SoC continues to go well and their Jetson TK1 ARM development board has reached the "kmscube" milestone.

Besides being able to try out re-clocking with Linux 3.16, there's also several other changes lined up for this next kernel release cycle when it comes to the Nouveau driver providing open-source NVIDIA graphics support.

The Nouveau DRM graphics driver for open-source NVIDIA support hasn't seen any fundamental re-clocking support breakthroughs for the upcoming Linux 3.16 kernel but the support can be easily enabled for select GeForce GPU models.

Besides Nouveau's 3D performance being very slow until re-clocking is figured out, the 2D performance of this open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver is also very slow.