Nouveau NIR Support Appears Almost Baked, NV50 Support Added

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Nouveau NIR Support Appears Almost Baked, NV50 Support Added

Karol Herbst at Red Hat started off this week by publishing his latest patches around Nouveau NIR support as part of the company's effort for getting SPIR-V/compute support up and running on this open-source NVIDIA driver...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-NIR-IR-V6

[uid313]

NV50 means GeForce 8 from 2006.
12 year old graphics card.

[wdb974]

NV50 means GeForce 8 from 2006.
12 year old graphics card.

While that is true, NV50 also refers to the older nvidia driver: there's NV50 for older cards and NVC0 for newer cards.

Also, please don't crucify me, kernel devs and other Linux mavens — I only have next to no idea how different driver components interact with each other. So, if I used a term incorrectly, just point it out.

[pmoreau]

While that is true, NV50 also refers to the older nvidia driver: there's NV50 for older cards and NVC0 for newer cards.

Also, please don't crucify me, kernel devs and other Linux mavens — I only have next to no idea how different driver components interact with each other. So, if I used a term incorrectly, just point it out.

Correct, though from Mesa’s point of view, the two drivers are “nouveau” (>=NV50) and “nouveau_vieux” (<NV50, I am not sure whether it supports everything before NV50, or only some of those cards). So maybe nv50 and nvc0 should be referred to as “sub-drivers”? Not sure.

Edit: I stand corrected, there is also nv30 which is part of “nouveau” and deals with NV3x and NV4x, so “nouveau_vieux” is only for NV2x and below. I also fixed the naming of the driver for old NVIDIA GPUs to “nouveau_vieux” (from “vieux”).

NV50 means GeForce 8 from 2006.
12 year old graphics card.

The nv50 sub-driver in Mesa supports all Tesla cards, so everything from the original NV50 to the GT218, and including MCPXY). But those remain cards that were released between 2006 and 2009. When Karol mentioned he added support for nv50, he meant the nv50 sub-driver, not just the NV50 chip.

[DanL]

https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/CodeNames/

[OneBitUser]

Let's hope that this push from RedHat will result in actual benefits for everyone - not just those parties who are interested in GPGPU compute.

Seems to me that they have the same issue as with desktop nouveau... which means that if it gets fixed for GPGPU, then it will bring about the fix for desktop graphics.

[nanonyme]

I don't to be honest understand the hate towards people contributing to old hardware anyhow. If there's contributions, there's users who need it, that's the number one rule of opensource software (doesn't necessarily go the other way, having users doesn't necessarily mean anyone contributes)

[Veerappan]

I don't to be honest understand the hate towards people contributing to old hardware anyhow. If there's contributions, there's users who need it, that's the number one rule of opensource software (doesn't necessarily go the other way, having users doesn't necessarily mean anyone contributes)

I, for one still use a laptop at home that has a gf9400m as it's only graphics chip with nouveau. And it works just fine for what I need it to do.