Nouveau Is Back To Needing NVIDIA GPU Dumps

Written by Michael Larabel in Nouveau on 31 July 2013 at 07:07 PM EDT. 6 Comments
NOUVEAU
The Nouveau driver project is back to needing reverse-engineering data dumps on select NVIDIA graphics processors, which will help in some new re-clocking work. If you're just a Linux desktop user but wanting to help out this reverse-engineered NVIDIA driver project, providing MMIOtrace dumps is a great way to contribute.

In the early days of Nouveau, lots of data dumps were needed for reverse-engineering the NVIDIA binary blob. Basically MMIOtrace was loaded to the kernel (the support was since mainlined) and to then trace the driver's interaction with the graphics hardware during various operations. Not as many of these data dumps are needed these days for existing hardware since the Nouveau developers generally have a rather good understanding of how to program the NVIDIA graphics processors.

Nouveau contributor Roy Spliet is calling out today for more NVIDIA MMIOtrace dumps for certain GPUs. He's in need of more MMIotraces on NVIDIA NVAA and NVAF GPUs, which comes down to GeForce 8 series mobile GPUs, GeForce 9 series mobile GPUs, NVIDIA ION, and the nForce IGP. He's wanting this data from different NVIDIA GPus to try to better understand the NVAC clock tree.

Roy made the call for this data on the Nouveau mailing list. Collecting NVIDIA MMIOtraces really aren't a hard process for non-developer Linux users. If you need to understand the collection process better, see the Nouveau Wiki and the Ubuntu X tracing guide.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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