Nouveau Companion 41

Just in time for the holidays is a new Nouveau Companion newsletter to update the community on the status of this open-source 2D/3D NVIDIA driver that is written by clean room reverse-engineering of NVIDIA's binary driver. It has been a while since Nouveau Companion 40, but there is still active work going into this X.Org driver. Among the topics covered in the 41st edition of the Nouveau Companion is kernel mode-setting, Gallium3D, layering GEM on top of TTM (similar to the GEM-ified TTM Radeon driver), and thermal monitoring code for the Nouveau driver.

Well, I bet most of you did not expect me to show up shortly before the end of the year with yet another TiNDC. There has been some turmoil regarding my job. At first it was too much work followed by a somewhat unexpected folding of the company. So I had to find a new job, which is why I never turned up for quite some time.

PQ jumped in and did a splendid job on TiNDC #40 which gave me some headroom in digging through the pile of IRC logs. So this issue will mostly touch older topics and tries to stay clear of what was already covered by PQ. In the future I hope to write an issue at least once a month.

Much has happened: NVidia has announced new cards, released a bunch of beta drivers and a new final release. GeForce 5 cards are now delegated to the legacy driver.

As always: Corrections, additions and questions either on IRC or on the Phoronix Forums will be welcome.

The (Not So) Current Status

Ok, much ground to cover. I will start to summarize events from June 1st to October 30th. The next issue will cover everything from November 1st up to the then current status.

Silverpower reported hard lockups from Nouveau. P0g investigated and found that the DRM detected a different arch than what the DDX used. He posted a patch which Silverpower tested, but which still caused lockups. P0g was a bit confused because the DRM detected a different arch than what was used by the DDX.

Marcheu cleared up the confusion by giving an example: The DDX may use NV10 EXA on NV20 while using the NV20 context switching code.

Mjg59 and Malc0 were working on suspend / resume on a laptop. Mjg59 had problems in restoring the display to a working state. Some of the noticed problems were:

- 1x1 pixel display size detected
- backlight not turned on after a real suspend
- blooming

Faking a suspend / resume via ''echo -n test >/sys/power/disk, echo -n disk >/sys/power/state'' printed out seemingly correct values, though (details here). One reason - it turned out - was an old Nouveau version, which still had the old randr code as default.