Nouveau News Archives

Similar to yesterday's early Radeon DRM benchmarks from Linux 3.10, here's some initial OpenGL performance results for NVIDIA GeForce hardware when using the Nouveau DRM that's updated in the Linux 3.10 kernel.

The pull request for the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Linux graphics driver for the Linux 3.10 kernel has been submitted to the DRM subsystem maintainer. While Nouveau has many shortcomings against the official NVIDIA Linux graphics driver, there isn't much to get excited about with this new kernel driver update.

The first NVIDIA Tegra DRM driver changes for the Linux 3.10 kernel are now known.

Initial patches are ready to provide support for OpenGL geometry shaders within the Nouveau NV50 Gallium3D driver.

The developers behind the reverse-engineered open-source Nouveau graphics driver for NVIDIA hardware are still hard at work on preparing new changes for introduction with the Linux 3.10 kernel.

There was a bit of Gallium3D Nouveau activity merged to master this morning.

Nouveau, the reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver, is faster for some OpenGL games when running on the soon-to-be-released Linux 3.9 kernel.

Christoph Bumiller published a set of new Linux kernel DRM driver patches for Nouveau, which includes support for VRAM compression.

For starting off Friday's benchmarking at Phoronix are some numbers when looking at the Nouveau driver with Ubuntu 13.04 against NVIDIA's proprietary Linux graphics driver when both are controlling a Quadro GPU found on a ThinkPad laptop.

With the recent Intel Ivy Bridge graphics benchmarks and the newer Radeon Gallium3D results, the plan was also for some updated Nouveau Gallium3D benchmarks too ahead of the release of Linux 3.8 and Mesa 9.1. Unfortunately, the reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA support is still very much hit or miss.

The open-source Nouveau driver now has "Reverse PRIME" support.

With Git activity that took place this morning in mainline Mesa, the Nouveau driver now supports hardware-accelerated video decoding for this open-source NVIDIA driver with GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" and GeForce 600 "Kepler" graphics cards using their dedicated video engines.

There's a small point release out for the xf86-video-nouveau X.Org graphics driver.

While NVIDIA has published open-source 2D driver code for their Tegra SoCs, there's DRM library code, and NVIDIA is working with a German company on an open-source driver, there's a small little hold-up in development.

Red Hat's Ben Skeggs pushed out new code this morning into the Nouveau DRM driver repository. In addition to some video BIOS work and other changes, initial support for the NVIDIA GK106 GPU was pushed into this reverse-engineered open-source driver.

One week after NVIDIA published 2D open-source driver code for their Tegra 2 ARM SoCs, which is applied to the Tegra DRM driver that will premiere with the Linux 3.8 kernel, code has now emerged for supporting the NVIDIA Tegra driver within the libdrm component.

More code was pushed to Nouveau's Linux kernel repository for their open-source DRM graphics driver. There's improvements to NVE0/Kepler, a new Falcon engine base class, and a number of other changes that have piled up.

The Gdev open-source NVIDIA CUDA run-time implementation is still being actively developed while PathScale's "PSCNV" fork of the Nouveau driver hasn't seen new commit activity in months.

Maarten Lankhorst released a stable xf86-video-nouveau X.Org graphics driver update today for the reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA support.

Ben Skeggs of Red Hat pushed a number of new DRM commits into the Nouveau driver development repository today, including new support for Z compression.

The fight continues about not changing the Linux kernel symbols for DMA-BUF so that NVIDIA can support NVIDIA Optimus Technology within their proprietary graphics driver.

Some prominent open-source graphics driver developers have published a paper for last week's USENIX HotPower 2012 that covered the topic of Power and Performance Analysis of GPU-Accelerated Systems.

While it will still be a while before the Linux 3.7 kernel is even released, the Linux 3.8 kernel may end up having better Nouveau driver re-clocking support for the common "NV50" NVIDIA GPU family.

With the significant DRM changes in the Linux 3.7 kernel there's something to enjoy out of all the major open-source graphics drivers. For Nouveau users, it's particularly exciting right now and there's more hope for the future.

There's some fan/thermal-related commits hitting the Nouveau driver's DRM repository.

According to a developer that began working on a PlayStation 3 graphics driver, which he's calling RSXGL, he reportedly got OpenGL 3.1 working from this Sony gaming console.

In continuation of NVIDIA Tegra With Open-Source Graphics Is Coming, here is the video that covers all of what's currently going on in the open-source Tegra world.

The Nouveau open-source driver is benefiting from sponsored X.Org EVoC work on the "Fermi Scripting Engine" to improve GeForce 400/500 series re-clocking.

Maarten Lankhorst talked at XDC2012 about the ongoing open-source work for supporting NVIDIA Optimus technology on the Linux desktop.

For those curious about the open-source Nouveau graphics driver performance on Ubuntu 12.10, here's a few benchmarks from a recent test release of the Quantal Quetzal with the reverse-engineered NVIDIA driver code.

The xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.2 driver was released today to take advantage of the new capabilities of X.Org Server 1.13.

The reverse-engineered open-source Nouveau driver has received its own FUC microcode implementation that frees it from having to use the binary microcode produced by the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver for the GeForce 600 "Kepler" graphics processors, but there's still problems ahead in supporting this latest-generation hardware.

While the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver could use a lot of help and the R600 Gallium3D driver still has an open TODO list, if you're a NVIDIA graphics hardware owner, the reverse-engineering Nouveau project could use your help.

Over the weekend there was the push by Red Hat's Ben Skeggs that effectively reworks/rewrites the Nouveau DRM kernel module for reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA graphics under Linux.

After delivering some development statistics on the xf86-video-intel driver yesterday, today there's a look at the development activity surrounding xf86-video-nouveau. This is the X.Org driver for Nouveau, the reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA driver.

Now that X.Org Server 1.13 RC1 is out there with the initial support for PRIME and other exciting features, dependent projects can also now move forward.

Gdev, the GPGPU run-time and resource management engines that provides an open-source NVIDIA CUDA run-time, is still being worked on at the University of California Santa Cruz in conjunction with PathScale.

After being in development for many years, the xf86-video-nouveau X.Org DDX driver finally saw its first release and it is version 1.0.

Supreet Pal Singh has provided an in-depth overview of his X.Org EVoC project for providing a Fermi scripting engine for the Nouveau driver that will allow for safe and dynamic GPU core / video memory re-clocking on modern NVIDIA GPUs.

With X.Org / Mesa / Wayland not being part of this year's GSoC, the X.Org Foundation is independently paying for some projects to motivate students over to summer to make some open-source driver improvements.

While still not available by default, the Nouveau NV10/NV20 Mesa DRI driver can now handle S3TC texture compression support when available.

An RFC patch-set was published this weekend for providing GPU lock-up recovery support within the Nouveau driver.

One week ago following the committing of the major libdrm re-write for the Nouveau project, the "NVFX" Gallium3D driver was dropped and succeeded by a new "NV30" driver for the GeForce FX/6/7 series GPUs. Unfortunately, for at least some hardware, this Nouveau support is still a busted mess.

The Nouveau Kepler Gallium3D code that was published yesterday does indeed work for allowing OpenGL acceleration on the GeForce 600 series using this reverse-engineered open-source code. In an odd story to end out the weekend, the Nouveau Kepler graphics driver consumed nearly 120GB of hard drive space while running this open-source driver on the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680.

Over three months passed between the time the Radeon HD 7970 launched and the time that initial Gallium3D support landed (yesterday). So how long is it going to take for a Gallium3D driver for NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 680 "Kepler" that launched just last month and has to be reverse-engineered by the community Nouveau members? Well, as of this afternoon, the Kepler Gallium3D driver is already available.

A massive Nouveau code push went through today affecting libdrm, the Mesa Gallium3D drivers, and the xf86-video-nouveau driver. The whole shebang should offer some performance improvements across the board while one driver has been completely rewritten and affects three generations of hardware.

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is shipping with the Nouveau driver by default as the open-source (reverse-engineered) NVIDIA graphics driver support, just as they have done in previous releases, but will this cause your mobile device to go through increased power use?

The reverse-engineered Nouveau driver project has two huge surprises to share with the NVIDIA-using Linux desktop community today. One announcement concerns new hardware enablement (Kepler!) and the other concerns the Nouveau driver's position within the Linux kernel.

While it's not often these days that there's worthwhile changes to talk about in an X.Org DDX driver, happening within the Nouveau driver camp in recent weeks has been some improvements to this open-source NVIDIA driver's buffer swap implementation and time-stamping.

Last week I posted an image quality comparison of the Radeon Gallium3D driver versus AMD's Catalyst Linux driver to highlight some visual differences between the open and closed-source Radeon graphics drivers. Now here's a look between the Nouveau Gallium3D driver and NVIDIA's proprietary Linux graphics driver.