Nouveau Companion 29

Although darktama was quiet during the last weeks, he wasn't lazy. He did some work on an NV4x TTM and Gallium prototype (just research, that code won't be released as is). After talking with marcheu about the pros and cons of the architecture both concluded that Gallium is the way to go.

While marcheu and darktama were coming to a decision, pmdata wanted to start coding DRI function on NV1x but was asked by Marcheu not to. Reasoning:

· Currently we want to get EXA working, with all the progress mentioned above, that won't take much longer
· Gallium is different from current DRI, especially for NV2x and earlier cards. Working on DRI would be wasting time.
· Marcheu is confident that >=NV3x cards won't have much problems getting a Gallium driver to work, but earlier cards will need some trickery (Which SuperMarcheu is going to supply :) )

See here.

With that in mind, marcheu stopped all his other nouveau related projects and set out to add a generic infrastructure to Gallium which will allow older cards with non-existent or fixed pipelines to offer acceleration. For Nouveau that would be all cards < NV30. But as this work is generic, it will beneficial for all cards which miss vertex and shader pipelines (e.g. older radeons). After that pmdata can finally start working on DRI.

Stillunknown was pestered by KoalaBR until he finally gave in and offered to (try to) get NV50 / G84 mode setting working. In an act of revenge, he enlisted KoalaBR as tester. First cautious tries to patch mode setting to a working state however yielded no change from the current situation. So we still can't switch back to text mode from X11.

Some other topics worth mentioning:

· hkBst's documentation patch for rules-ng of Xv related registers got merged by pq
· IronPeter and his work on PS3 is progressing steadily
· Due to the problem we talked about in the previous issue, notifiers are now always created in PCI memory.
· stillunknown added some video control registers to rules-ng for NV50.
· pmdata is working on finding out which texture formats are supported on NV1x and he did help ahuillet and p0g with NV1x problems
· DRM got a fix which prevents the card from hanging in case of an error.
· careym did fix a few OpenGL bugs in renouveau
· chowmeined did fix some modesettings on NV5x which resulted pink lines on the right side and at the bottom.

MmioTracing on nv50 cards may freeze the machine hard. Discovered by KoalaBR (but unable to reproduce later), PQ can reproduce it and tries to investigate, but he would be happy to have someone with NV50 hardware who can trigger the crash and has a genuine serial port with a serial terminal (another computer) to go with it. The task does not require much programming knowledge, but it does require the skill to configure and install a custom kernel, applying patches, and tolerating lots of hard crashes and reboots once in a while. This may be a long fight, so this person should be able to stay aboard for a few weeks minimum.

Help Needed

stillunknown is looking for 7xx0 card owners who would be willing to run a few tests for him. Furthermore he is looking for people with dual head (whatever combination of VGA /DVI) who are willing to test randr1.2 / mode setting. Additionally, please have a look at the "Testers wanted" page for requirements coming up between our issues. This is on our Wiki.

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