A Massive Nouveau Code Push Happened Today

[AlbertP]

Amazing, kudos to the devs.

When is this going to be available for testing? Linux 3.4?

This is not the kernel parts of Nouveau. It's about libdrm, Mesa (Gallium) 8.1, and the X.org part (xf86-video-nouveau). Also the merge window for the 3.4 kernel is already closed as we've already seen 3.4-rc releases.

[airlied]

That's what I mean with "the community seems more involved in nvidia reverse engineering than radeon"

Well there is non-community for nvidia, since it makes no sense.

From RH POV I'd say we put nearly the same manpower into both, its just that Ben is 100% focused on nvidia and can pull off some major feats of engineering, but for AMD myself and Jerome have a lot of other tasks to keep up with.

Also the thing is when you have access to developers with docs, you are more inclined to ask questions and wait rather than spend a lot of time with RE tools. Its kinda wierd, but the more RE you do the better at RE you get and the better the tools get. Since for AMD we don't do that much RE, when we do have to do some it takes an awful lot more effort. For instance I couldn't look at x86 asm now without spending a few hours getting back up to speed on it.

Dave.

[cl333r]

That's what I mean with "the community seems more involved in nvidia reverse engineering than radeon"

Imo it's not mainly due to Nvidia's market share, but because the other 2 types of cards are being taken care of by their vendors (AMD & Intel), so the community can focus (almost solely) on Nvidia.

Hadn't AMD (and Intel even earlier) gone open source - the nvidia devs efforts would be diluted to take care of AMD (and Intel) as well.

So the mere fact that AMD went open source helped indirectly a lot to improve Nouveau.

EDIT: Teho beat me to this.

[Teho]

I was just wondering why nvidia gets more efforts from the community...

I would assume that it's because it's needed. If there were no community involvement there wouldn't be any open source driver for nVidia. AMD however has team working on their open source GPU driver so altough community involvement helps it isn't required in the sameway.

[garegin]

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F16_bugs#Some_Macs_with_NVIDIA_graphics_adapters_cannot_boot_via_EFI_and_display_corrupted_graphics_when_booted_via_BIOS_emulation

[Veerappan]

Since AMD is working with open source won't they push documentation shortly (if not already)?

I'm not sure about documentation, but the Southern Islands initial support got pulled about 10 hours ago:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commit/?id=a75c6163e605f35b14f26930dd9227e4f337ec9e

[Nobu]

So, when is this getting pulled into Arch?

My nv4x is itching to try it out. ^_^

[chris200x9]

Since AMD is working with open source won't they push documentation shortly (if not already)?

[RussianNeuroMancer]

I hope it fix this: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=37681

[darkbasic]

Absence of documentation makes it even harder...