Nouveau Companion 35
In the 35th edition of the Nouveau Companion, these open-source 3D NVIDIA driver developers talk about being a better bug reporter, X-Video improvements, PowerPC fixes, and MMioTrace being delayed until the Linux 2.6.26 kernel. At least three Nouveau developers will be at FOSDEM 2008 next week in Brussels, Belgium.
Roughly two weeks have passed again so it is time again for yet another TiNDC.
As you probably know, we are using the bug tracking system at FreeDesktop.org. If you have problems, which can't be solved when asking for help on IRC, please do enter a bug there so that we can keep track of possible issues.
If you do so, please
- Lurk on the channel as reactions to your questions may be extremely delayed.
- Keep an eye on your bug in the tracker, so that you can react to feedback from
the developers (may be requests for more data, test request, patches etc.)
- Do test regularly (at least once a week) whether the bug was fixed
Entering a bug and forgetting about it won't help you and us much; we need your continued feedback!
When we started publishing our TiNDC on Phoronix first, the intention for us was to get a bit more publicity. Our Wiki was read by people who already knew about us, but their numbers stayed flat. Phoronix had already shown an interest in our project by publishing some news about our TiNDCs and Git commits.
So in some way it was (and still is) a perfect match: We do get more publicity and Phoronix gets information directly from the horse's mouth (so to speak). Hopefully, you as the reader are informed and entertained along the way too.
A few weeks after we started, Phoronix came forward and asked whether they could help us by giving us some spare hardware. Not wanting to be impolite nor wanting to look greedy we somewhat declined, as we are really well equipped with the whole range of NVidia cards except the most expensive ones.
The following email exchange, however, revealed that some of our developers are working on old hardware while Phoronix had better hardware collecting dust. So we agreed to ship some hardware like CPUs, motherboards and RAM to Marcheu. He in turn will either hand them out to our developers at FOSDEM or send the hardware directly to the developers.
So a very big "Thank you" to Phoronix for their great support!
A pro pos FOSDEM: We will be there with at least three people (Ahuillet, Malc0, and Marcheu). I will try to get there too and do some coverage of the event like last year, but having health issues currently, I may not be able to come.
Quote Of The Week
< fatal_> writing a graphics driver is hard. Writing a graphics driver for hardware you don't have any documentation for has been described as "impossible". The Nouveau project is about making the impossible possible. Don't expect it to happen overnight.
The Current Status
Since some time we had problems with NV4x card when trying to use Nouveau after rmmod'ding the blob. This problem was tracked down by stillunknown: It was due to an unknown register used by the blob (and ignored by us). After setting this register to a default of 0x01 it worked (git commit).
Marcheu committed a bunch of patches for the Xv texture adapter.
As already mentioned in the last issue, they added:
- bi cubic filtering for NV40 (NV30?)
- Prevent tearing
- add texture adapter via shaders on NV30
Unfortunately, some tests showed that the new filter resulted in blurriness compared to the blitter. Marcheu suspects some precision error in his code and is investigating. We had an endianess problem on PPC in there, too. We always get blue people running around, it seems. Marcheu fixed the texture adapter on PPC to swap U and V parts of the video.
Finally: The NV34 cards seem to be to slow to use this adapter. Please use the blitter / overlay instead. After that he will work on Gallium3D for NV3x until it is ready to hand it over to other capable hands.