Nouveau Companion 40

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Nouveau Companion 40

It's been almost six months since the last issue of the Nouveau Companion, but Pekka Paalanen has rejuvenated these efforts and has put out the 40th issue of this newsletter that updates the open-source community on the status of the Nouveau project, an effort to reverse-engineer NVIDIA's binary driver and provide a fully open-source 2D and 3D implementation. While we have been without the Nouveau Companion for many months, progress on the open-source Nouveau driver has continued. There is now GeForce 8 support with 2D EXA acceleration, work underway in implementing Gallium3D, switching the driver's memory manager from TTM to using a GEM API with TTM internals (similar to the ATI driver), and of course kernel mode-setting.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=13039

[Eragon]

They are farther than I tought, which is good news, but it's still crap

[TechMage89]

Unfortunately, there are no full time developers for nouveau, probably because none of the commercial distro makers wants to tick of nvidia.

Therefore development of nouveau is done (I think) exclusively by hackers who work on it in their free time. Therefore, as reverse engineering and programming a graphics driver (which is starting to resemble an operating system in and of itself) is not an easy or simple task, progress goes slowly.

[Pfanne]

Unfortunately, there are no full time developers for nouveau, probably because none of the commercial distro makers wants to tick of nvidia.

why would they tick nvidia off by improving the open source experience with their hardware...

[ethana2]

...because nVidia is fricking paranoid about people maybe having a clue how their gpu's work, as if they were something special, that's why.

[deanjo]

why would they tick nvidia off by improving the open source experience with their hardware...

They don't get ticked off, otherwise they would have been ticked with nvraid, forcedeth and alsa support.

[stan]

There's a shortage of developers even for hardware that is relatively well documented (ie. R500). Why would distros want to waste their scarce resources to help out NVidious, a company that doesn't give a **** about open source and software freedom?

[_txf_]

There's a shortage of developers even for hardware that is relatively well documented (ie. R500). Why would distros want to waste their scarce resources to help out NVidious, a company that doesn't give a **** about open source and software freedom?

Because they would be helping the users, not nvidia. As far as I'm aware the majority of linux users that have a proper gpu tend to have nvidia...

[remm]

At some point, users who are interested in open source should still get a clue and not buy NVidia.

[krazy]

Because they would be helping the users, not nvidia. As far as I'm aware the majority of linux users that have a proper gpu tend to have nvidia...

Making nvidia cards work on linux through no effort of the hardware provider would improve popularity of those cards among linux users - more cash in nvidia's pocket.

Here's an interesting analysis of the graphics market.

http://arstechnica.com/journals/hardware.ars/2008/08/18/ati-projects-significant-market-share-gain-by-end-of-2008