Open-Source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Driver Sees Few Changes For Linux 5.20

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Open-Source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Driver Sees Few Changes For Linux 5.20

There hasn't been much to report on lately for the reverse-engineered Nouveau driver providing open-source NVIDIA GPU driver support on Linux. Several recent Linux kernel series haven't even seen any Nouveau DRM/KMS driver pull requests with changes. For the upcoming Linux 5.20 cycle, a Nouveau set of changes were sent in today to DRM-Next but it's quite tiny...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-Linux-5.20

[Jabberwocky]

Unfortunate. I wonder how well the nouveau 780 Ti runs under nouveau compared to legacy proprietary driver.

Goodluck with the people analysing Nvidia's code dump.

[Barley9432]

Unfortunate. I wonder how well the nouveau 780 Ti runs under nouveau compared to legacy proprietary driver.

Goodluck with the people analysing Nvidia's code dump.

Pretty badly considering there's no Vulkan support. There goes 99% of the Steam library.

[nvaert1986]

Unfortunate. I wonder how well the nouveau 780 Ti runs under nouveau compared to legacy proprietary driver.

Goodluck with the people analysing Nvidia's code dump.

I wouldn't recommend anyone using a 600 or 700 series GPU using nouveau for any other purpose besides basic graphics output and basic acceleration (it's good enough for an initial install wizard of a distribution for example), but that's just my opinion.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

I wouldn't recommend anyone using a 600 or 700 series GPU using nouveau for any other purpose besides basic graphics output and basic acceleration (it's good enough for an initial install wizard of a distribution for example), but that's just my opinion.

This jives with my experience on the Quadro side. I've purchased several old workstations that came with K2200 GPUs. Despite the "K" in the name, they were actually the first Maxwell 1.0 based Quadros along with the K620. You really don't want to use Nouveau on these things besides getting through your distro's installer. It isn't just about peak performance. Just basic stability is an issue along with weird artifacting etc. Once you install the binary driver they are decent cards. About 20% slower at 3D than an old GCN 1.0 Radeon 7850 which was a 1080p card back in the day, but with double the VRAM at 4GB. And on the plus side, they are still supported by the latest Nvidia driver branch, so you get GBM support and other improvements that were never put into the Kepler 470 series drivers.

[Kemosabe]

After all those years, nouveau's primary use case remains to start a browser to either download the real driver or to read the manual on how to install it on random distribution Z.

[DanL]

I wouldn't recommend anyone using a 600 or 700 series GPU using nouveau for any other purpose besides basic graphics output and basic acceleration

I found my 8400GS(rev2) worked suprisingly well with nouveau for desktop use, light gaming, and VDPAU accel.

[QwertyChouskie]

NVK development has also slowed a lot over the past 3 weeks: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/nouve...its/nouveau/vk

[Barley9432]

After all those years, nouveau's primary use case remains to start a browser to either download the real driver or to read the manual on how to install it on random distribution Z.

I disagree. On Fedora (thank you Fedora for being one of the most ideological distros out there and making everyone's experience a pain because of your agenda) you can't even get to desktop on KDE with Nouveau. Such a joke of a driver that's a waste of everyone's time

[Barley9432]

NVK development has also slowed a lot over the past 3 weeks: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/nouve...its/nouveau/vk

It's just two guys doing it anyways, in the best case scenario it'll just be a driver just to show to Torvalds and say "see NVIDIA kernel driver is used by an open source one!' so that NVIDIA doesn't have to do any of the hard work.

Plan is likely for Nouveau to use NVIDIA's kernel driver so it can be upstreamed and then NVIDIA can keep their own userspace driver closed source.