Nouveau Companion 36

TiNDC: Giving "State of Nouveau" talks at FOSDEM seems to be a good tradition now, with talks since the inception of the project. Will you keep that tradition next year? Or you others: Do you intend to come again?

Marcheu: At FOSDEM 2006, there was just 1 nouveau developer (me). It was the first announcement, so you couldn't expect more. At FOSDEM 2007, two developers were there (Koala and me). FOSDEM 2008 saw the venue of 4 developers (ahuillet, malc0, p0g and me) so I guess we can only go exponential from there. That would be a nice tradition, how about FOSDEM 2009 with 8 Nouveau devs :) I really hope to come again to FOSDEM next year. FOSDEM sees 4000 visitors each year, so the audience is wider than XDC/XDS which only gather X.Org developers. That is surely a good way to reach a larger crowd.

malc0: Too early to say for sure, but I'd like to, certainly. Additionally, Malc0 agreed to answer a few more questions about the current status of Randr1.2:

TiNDC: You got a bunch of hardware from Marcheu donated by Phoronix and donors, what are you trying to do with it? Which problems do you want to solve?

malc0: Basically I got it so I could easily test my code on a wider range of cards (for cold booting, kernel mode-setting, suspend/resume). Ahuillet gave me an nv11 that I thought did not work under Randr1.2, and I was going to fix, but it seems to work fine :)

TiNDC: So, how good do you think is Nouveau randr1.2 as of now? Marcheu wants to drop the old code, it seems :) And if I understood correctly, either we or DRM in general will get kernel mode setting within the next 2-3 months?

malc0: Randr1.2 is fairly good now. There's a couple of bugs on nv11/nv17 I'm working on (obviously we can't remove the old code before single-head works for everyone). A month after making Randr1.2 default does After a few months kernel mode-setting should not be two hard; it matches the Randr1.2 structure '''very''' closely I'm waiting for the Intel guys to sort out the problems with a kernel mode-setting DDX though :) And of course, we'll need TTM...

TiNDC: Yes, as far as I understood darktama, Nouveau [on NV4x] will sooner or later crap out due to out-of-memory problems like leakage and simplistic "memory management".
Malc0: There's that, and that the kernel mode-setting infrastructure seems to assume you are using the TTM API Maybe there's a way round it that darktama/marcheu could find, but really I think the benefits of moving of having a proper memory manager would make such an effort short sighted. (Editor: This is undisputed by marcheu and darktama)
TiNDC: Anything interesting about FOSDEM you would like me to write?

malc0: Not really. Some of the X.org talks were very interesting (but rather hot), and the beer and socializing was great, but I leave that up to you whether you want that in a TiNDC :)

Editor: In case you are wondering about references to "sauna" and "hot", the X.org was warm like an oven :)

So let's go and see some pictures:

p0g (left) and malc0 (right) found yet another BIOS bug?

ahuillet (left) and marcheu (right) during the talk.

"Oh wow, NV4x really works - unbelievable". Marcheu presenting OpenArena on Nouveau.
(Marcheu's answer: "Hey, this is all daniels fault for making jokes about glxgears :)"

The pictures were taken by ahuillet, bbartek and Michael Larabel. Thanks a lot.