Nouveau Companion 29
In this edition of the Nouveau Companion, the developers of the open-source 2D/3D NVIDIA display driver talk about IRC color coding, NV04 performance improvements, texture fixes, EXA advancements, register combiners, and more. Also being worked on by the Nouveau camp has been a NV4x TTM and Gallium prototype. The Nouveau developers are still in need of some additional testing, so be sure to give them a hand if you're able to do so.
Introduction
Here we go again: Prepare for issue number 29 of the TiNDC. When we were talking about our project's infrastructure in the last couple of issues, it was mostly negative news (no scripts working, need to move to FD.o etc). Finally, we can report something positive about it: We have HTML versions with links and colored nicks thanks to a script by MJules. That version was well received and even allowed tagging so that you could link to a certain line in the log (by entering '==== (topic)'). You can see which topics were tagged on the tag index page.
But the script gave some false positives and thus pachi went out and improved on it. The script is now able to add HTML anchors automatically based on time stamps. You can find both script, style sheet and the colored logs at this link. This option should come in handy for the TiNDC. Let us know, whether you like this or not.
Additionally, we now have a page where important test requests are announced. So if you want to help us out and don't want to code, please have a look here.
One last topic before we start with the progress report itself. The question came up, why there is such a long delay between Phoronix.com publishing the TiNDC and me putting it up on the Wiki. It is simple:
· A short grace period of a few hours
· Different timezones (which fits well with reason 1)
· And this time due to real life concerns, I wasn't able to get to my computer
before Saturday noon (CEST). At that time KMeyer already was done.
The Current Status
ahuillet added a patch to increase the performance on NV04. The patch cached calls to BLIT_OPERATION and RECT_OPERATION. As these are software methods, calling them too often slows down the system dramatically. This patch can be found on the FreeDesktop gitweb.
At the end of the last issue we saw ahuillet, pmdata and p0g fighting the perils of texturing and coloring triangles and quads on NV1x. The result varied wildly (from changing colors over black squads to only partly of rendered texture (1 Texel), just pick the failure of your choice and our developer can tell you that they already suffered through it.
Finally he had success; it was a missing bit for texturing in the init code. P0g did more work on NV1x blending / transparency. First tries yielded black borders around icons instead of the background. He did some investigations and found the culprit: Transparency wasn't enabled, so he whipped up a patch.
Another problem fixed was non power of two textures (textures with a width / height, which is not a power of two) need to have an even size. Odd widths are rounded up.