Nouveau's Changes Sent Out For Linux 5.4 In Fixing Up The Open-Source NVIDIA Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Nouveau's Changes Sent Out For Linux 5.4 In Fixing Up The Open-Source NVIDIA Support

While NVIDIA recently began publishing more hardware documentation, don't expect it to make an immediate difference in the quality of the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver. Today the pull request was sent to DRM-Next of the Nouveau kernel driver changes for the upcoming Linux 5.4 cycle and there isn't much to get excited about...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-Linux-5.4-Changes

[lateo]

Well, the newest working config for my optimus laptop was Fedora+kernel 5.1.9. Newer kernels will oops.
Even the install procedure from ISO will oops when it's time to load gdm or just after loading it.
Had to drop Fedora and go to Debian+kernel 4.19 to have a somewhat working laptop back.

Under-using your hardware already was a pain, but with all those little issues with optimus added to the mix…
Wondering if i should buy a Lenovo T495 to put an end to this…

Nouveau's team work is great, but it's just too painful to own Nvidia hardware in a laptop.

[timofonic]

Nouveau will always be crap compared to officially endorsed drivers.

[tenplus1]

Im currently using noveau drivers for my nvidia ion v.2 gfx as it runs the desktop a lot smoother than the nvidia blob and uses 200mb less memory in the process, so I'd rather take a performance hit than have a laggy desktop.

[bemerk]

Nouveau will always be crap compared to officially endorsed drivers.

Never say never.
Why shouldn't the community be able to get the reclocking firmware out of the driver and figure out how to use the hardware properly?
Reverse Engineering has done quite a lot for drivers .
I never expected Opensource Drivers for Mali and Adreno GPUs either or the broadcom videocore. I was proven wrong.

[timofonic]

Never say never.
Why shouldn't the community be able to get the reclocking firmware out of the driver and figure out how to use the hardware properly?
Reverse Engineering has done quite a lot for drivers .
I never expected Opensource Drivers for Mali and Adreno GPUs either or the broadcom videocore. I was proven wrong.

Do you live in reality?

Nouveau project has an extreme lack of manpower. There's a big lack of funding, Red Hat/IBM and Nvidia contributions are too few compared just to AMD ones.

Nvidia hardware is so absurdly complex. But not only that, their binary blob is a complex beast and a total nightmare.

Adreno and Mali are simpler designs, yet their reverse engineered drivers have a tiny fraction of the functionality of the proprietary drivers.

Are you joking? I consider you are extremely optimistic, not realistic at all.

[rhysk]

The nouveau changes for Linux 5.4 include one of the larger, by number, of contributors compared to the last few cycles.

It also includes the (first?) kernel patches from Mark Menzynski, the RedHat intern. This brings to approximately four the RedHat employees working on nouveau! Well done.

[starshipeleven]

Why shouldn't the community be able to get the reclocking firmware out of the driver and figure out how to use the hardware properly?

Because as stated already it's more a legal issue than a technical one.

I never expected Opensource Drivers for Mali and Adreno GPUs either or the broadcom videocore. I was proven wrong.

This is your own problem.

You can't compare the complexity of an embedded device GPU with a bigass high-performance desktop/laptop part. Also they don't need any firmware or what they need can be easily extracted from the blob driver.