NVIDIA + Nouveau: "Hopefully More Surprises To Come"

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVIDIA + Nouveau: "Hopefully More Surprises To Come"

Alexandre Courbot, a developer at NVIDIA who has been working on the Tegra open-source graphics support a lot for Nouveau, presented last week at LinuxCon Europe 2015...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...-LinuxCon-Euro

[mark45]

Good/proper OOTB VDPAU support for Nouveau.
Because statistically people watch video a lot more than play games. And OpenGL support in nouveau is basically good enough for anything except games.

[karolherbst]

Good/proper OOTB VDPAU support for Nouveau.
Because statistically people watch video a lot more than play games. And OpenGL support in nouveau is basically good enough for anything except games.

it isn't good enough for games?

[Gusar]

Good/proper OOTB VDPAU support for Nouveau.

What's missing? Ok, firmware is. But that's a distro problem, Arch has a package to get the firmware - it downloads the proprietary driver and runs a script that extracts the firmware from it, other distros could have something similar. Ideally Nvidia would release it under a redistributable license, but I don't see that happening, they'll probably just release the signed firmware for Maxwell2 and newer, but not the decoder firmware for older GPUs.

it isn't good enough for games?

OpenGL is good enough (well, not for the games requiring 4.3, but that's an issue for all open drivers, it's not specific to nouveau), the problem is lack of reclocking. Without the ability to clock the GPU into its highest performance state, it'll simply be too slow for a lot of games.

[adlerhn]

Proper Optimus support. Because a lightning fast driver or gfx card is worth exactly 0 if you are using bumblebee (for energy savings) and rarely bother or remember to enable the discrete card.

[SXX⁣]

it isn't good enough for games?

Mesa part of Nouveau is okay on many GPUs, but without reclocking it's useless.

[Gusar]

Proper Optimus support. Because a lightning fast driver or gfx card is worth exactly 0 if you are using bumblebee (for energy savings) and rarely bother or remember to enable the discrete card.

Nouveau has proper Optimus support, does it not? Bumblebee is only necessary for the proprietary driver. And there the solution is libglvnd, there's been discussion about it recently at the mesa mailing list.

[mark45]

What's missing? Ok, firmware is. But that's a distro problem

No, it's a nouveau problem. If nouveau shipped by default with firmware and the distro cuts out the firmware - that's a distro problem.

Not to mention the firmware how-to webpage I've been given on this forum doesn't even bother mentioning Fedora or Ubuntu as supported distros - now that's the type of webpage I'm going to trust, not.

[imirkin]

No, it's a nouveau problem. If nouveau shipped by default with firmware and the distro cuts out the firmware - that's a distro problem.

Not to mention the firmware how-to webpage I've been given on this forum doesn't even bother mentioning Fedora or Ubuntu as supported distros - now that's the type of webpage I'm going to trust, not.

Would it matter? It appears that you're a lot more interested in complaining about nouveau than using it. If we had X, you'd complain about Y. If we had Y, you'd complain about Z, and so on. The instructions for extracting video decoding firmware from the blob are pretty simple and work on all distros (that have basic tools).

The reason that Fedora and Ubuntu aren't explicitly on that page is that no one has created packages for them. I can only assume this is because no one uses those distros (I know I certainly don't). And if they do, they're not interested in using nouveau, in which case, no point in worrying about them. Or perhaps those package managers aren't flexible enough to work with NVIDIA's inflexible redistribution policy. Either way, there won't be dedicated instructions for a distro until some interested party creates them.

You talk about OOTB support, but the box is the distro -- pick a distro that has the relevant packages, and prestro -- OOTB support! There is no single "nouveau" package. There is no nouveau box with a CD at your friendly local CompUSA store (like there was a RedHat one).

[Ardje]

Eh guys, this guy is talking about nouveau for the tegra, so unless you are playing games or video on an armhf or arm64, I guess your problems for this article are not relevant. And as the guy is saying: nouveau for tegra seems to have full nvidida backing, which makes them a very big competitor for broadcom(raspberry pi) and exynos (odroids and such), and maybe qualcomm (although they have freedreno).