Nouveau Driver XDC2011 Status Update

Martin Peres provided a status update on the Nouveau driver during XDC2011 Chicago. Ben Skeggs, who's employed by Red Hat Australia to work on this open-source NVIDIA driver, was also in attendance at this development conference. Here's some of the key points in terms of future work.

- In terms of power management, temperature and clock reading support is working. Video BIOS parsing is mostly ready. Setting clocks is not yet done and can be dangerous, since if done incorrectly, the graphics card could be damaged due to heat or other mishaps.

- Memory timings support for NV50 to NVD9 ASICs is almost done.

- Reliable clock changes is almost ready for NV30 through NVC0 hardware.

- AGP / PCI-E clock gating is still being reverse engineered.

- NVIDIA GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" re-clocking support is still a work in progress. Skeggs has some unpublished code, but it's still not in good shape for being able to run the Fermi graphics cards at their stock speeds.

- Performance counters and dynamic re-clocking is still a work in progress,

Martin also did a nice demo of the new video acceleration support in Nouveau that's exposed via XvMC.