It's been about a month since the last Nouveau Companion, the development newsletter talking about the work going into the open-source 3D NVIDIA display driver, but today the latest edition is now available. Covered in the 27th edition of the Nouveau Companion are details on the progress made in the past month such as with porting the driver to using libpciaccess, bug squashing, 2D acceleration working for NVIDIA's GeForce 8800GTX, X-Video fixes, and RandR 1.2 support was merged back into the Nouveau master branch. The Nouveau developers have received a few new graphics card donations but are still in need of development help and testing.

Ok back from my vacation and trying to recap four weeks of progress.

But before we begin some comments on the feedback I got regarding our move to Phoronix. To make it short: we raised the suspicion that we would sell out.

I am really flattered, I would have never expected that I would have readers who are so passionate about the TiNDC and where it is published first.

So why did we move? Basically to get the possibility to address a wider audience and perhaps get some contributors from there. We are pragmatic here: Everything that may help the project move forward is worth a try and we are doing it not so much for us but for you. Not trying is loosing or giving up in our eyes.

Before we judge the usefulness of our actions why not give it a chance? Within the first 3 days we got 14,000 hits on Phoronix.com and that was even before the article was mentioned on Linuxgames.com and Digg. Whether that results in more contributors is still to be seen.

The coming issues will not have such a long delay between publishing on Phoronix and publishing on the Wiki, but due to time zones there will be a delay of roughly one day.

Well, the time since our last TiNDC has seen AMD releasing their specs to the Open Source community [AMD's Open-Source Strategy Explained]. We are glad that our pals over at Radeon are that lucky, hopefully NVidia will see the light someday too.

The Current Status

The end of August saw yet another move of parts of our services from personal accounts (in school, university etc) to FreeDesktop.org. JussiP's status page, Kmeyer's script to update the dump directories from Gmail and Marcheu's logger all moved to FreeDesktop.org.

With ahuillet's work on Xv done for the moment, developer attention shifted to other features.

First stillunknown did the port of our device detection code in nouveau to libpciaccess. This library is Xorg 7.3's (Xserver 1.3+) new way of dealing with hardware accesses in a platform independent way, addressing some of the major complaints about Xorg hardware detection. Later tests by Marcheu on NV04 showed it worked fine.

During the initial discussion of his plans with marcheu and Thunderbird, marcheu noted that he wanted to get rid of the PCI-ID list within nouveau. He intended to use only registers (like PMC_BOOT_0) for architecture detection and avoid anything which is targeted at a specific card and not an architecture. Stillunknown did as he was asked to and presented a patch which worked with PMC_BOOT_0 (on NV50 that is register offset $88000 instead).