Nouveau Developments: KMS, Suspend & Resume

Yesterday there was a news article on Phoronix entitled What's Up With RadeonHD and Nouveau? As was mentioned in that article, not a lot of news has come out of either X.Org project in recent months nor any driver releases (except that changed for RadeonHD yesterday afternoon) and users have started to wonder about the project's status. Never once did we imply that the Nouveau driver was dead, but that it was "not accelerating as fast as some would like." Nouveau's Ben Skeggs though felt differently and has now written a blog post detailing some of the recent developments for this open-source NVIDIA driver.

Since the release of Fedora 11 (early June), the Nouveau driver has matured with its kernel mode-setting, support for G80 series kernel mode-setting, improvements to its NVIDIA video BIOS reading abilities, a new method for submitting commands to the display engine (display push buffer), tiled scan-out, and suspend-and-resume support with Nouveau KMS. Kernel mode-setting for NVIDIA hardware with the Nouveau driver will be the default in Fedora 12.

Additionally, the G80 Gallium3D driver is maturing, initial TV-Out support for NV04 through G70 ASICs is being worked on, and work is also underway in adding support for DisplayPort connectors. All of this work can be found in the driver that will land in Fedora 12, while manual steps may be needed to setup this driver for other distributions until a stable release is made.

Thanks for this status update, Ben, and we apologize if anyone took offense by thinking we were implying that the Nouveau driver is dead. Ben's blog post can be found on this page.