Nouveau Companion 36

With FOSDEM 2008 taking place about two weeks ago, the 36th edition of the Nouveau Companion contains a special feature with FOSDEM-Nouveau coverage as well as in-depth thoughts from the developers that had attended this Linux conference in Brussels. Also covered in this development newsletter is new Gallium3D progress in their mainline Nouveau branch, MMioTrace is still planned for the Linux 2.6.26 kernel, and more RandR 1.2 improvements within this free software NVIDIA driver.

Hello again to our TiNDC. Just to make sure, that the "i" in the name is really for "irregular", this issue comes somewhat late. Reason is simple: We had FOSDEM in Brussels on February 23/24. As Marcheu did a presentation there and a few of our project members were there too, I did delay this issue on purpose to get some feedback.

Meanwhile, part 1 of our "Status of Nouveau" article is available at LWN.net.

You know, what I call sabotage? I think sabotage is when the IRC is absolutely silent, I finish up the (then) current issue and send it out for publication and within hours both Marcheu and Darktama start pushing their Gallium changes into mainline (Gallium branch). So just that you know guys: I am officially miffed ;)

The Current Status

So work on 3D started in earnest. Marcheu already told me before that he was going to start Gallium work for NV3x cards before FOSDEM and would try to finish as much as possible, so that he could hand over the responsibility to other projects members for 3D on NV3x along with fitting cards.

Within a few days, he stayed true to his word and started pushing his work. At the weekend of FOSDEM pmdata picked up where marcheu left and pushed his first two patches.

So, a bit neglected because I missed it a few times in the logs: Marcheu has been working on a solution for using Gallium on older 3D cards. He will be talking about that a bit more detailed in our FOSDEM section a bit further down. He pushed (as noted above) his changes already into the Gallium branch.

- ahuillet, pmdata working on NV30 (ahuillet will start at the end of the month)
- p0g intending to work on NV1x once marcheu is finished (p0g: of course if marcheu doesn't finish it in a year or so I might plug my nv30 or nv40 and work on that :))
- Marcheu working on a Gallium driver for NV1x
- Darktama working on NV4x and to some degree on NV5x
- Stillunknown and Malc0 working on mode setting (Randr1.2)

With that said, you should note that our current DRI driver (linked from the Wiki front page) is deprecated and no longer supported!

So I just wanted to mention this to avoid further accusations that I'm missing important topics :)

Finally, the problem with Upload To Screen / Download From Screen functions for PPC was fixed. Using PCIgart in all cases will now work.

As already hinted at in the last issue, there were problems with the performance of the bi-cubic texture adapter on some cards. So after some talk with marcheu, stillunknown started to implement a second adapter:
- bi linear (default)
- bi cubic (selectable).