Need good FLOSS drivers for 3D cards (NVIDIA, ATI) [LWN.net]

Need good FLOSS drivers for 3D cards (NVIDIA, ATI)

Posted Apr 8, 2008 17:39 UTC (Tue) by dwheeler (guest, #1216)
Parent article: A Linux Driver Project status report

I disagree with Greg KH on one key point: There is still another major missing driver piece: _good_ FLOSS 3D drivers for the NVIDIA and ATI cards. Yes, there are some partial solutions, but it's not "stick in the install disk and everything works well", which is the only measure that matters.

I'm well aware that a lot is not actually done in the Linux kernel. So what? The userspace/kernelspace division is great for organizing, but the only thing users care about is "does it work?"

I would REALLY like to see some of these "developers twiddling their thumbs" to accelerate development of FLOSS 3D drivers for NVIDIA and ATI. If necessary, through reverse engineering. This is a major stumblingblock right now. The NVIDIA proprietary code works, unless you update some other component, at which point they often break... so even if you're not big on FLOSS, they are still a big problem.

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Need good FLOSS drivers for 3D cards (NVIDIA, ATI)

Posted Apr 8, 2008 18:48 UTC (Tue) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

Similar experience with fglrx for ATI. Works mostly fine for 2D, but sometimes some parts of
the display are not updated when I switch desktops. Overlay mostly works, except when the
whole X server crashes. Googleearth works, except the popup windows are either "see-through"
or empty. Not to mention that I have to reboot the laptop when I take it off from the docking
station, because I can't switch between the built-in LCD and the outputs on the docking
station. Oh, and I haven't tested the TV-out yet. So it works, but there are a couple of
but's. Of course, it might not be something that the LDP could fix.

Need good FLOSS drivers for 3D cards (NVIDIA, ATI)

Posted Apr 9, 2008 1:52 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

The Nvidia driver was the #1 reason Vista crashed as revealed by court released Microsoft
documents. Over 28% of the crashes were caused by it and that's comparing it to
_every_single_piece_of_hardware_ that Vista supports.

Nearly a third.

I am told that the core of the Windows driver is about the same as what is used in Linux.

Soooo... That's not looking pretty.
the thing about Linux and 3D drivers is that the driver model is f*ked. It's a huge mess. And
it's not even Linux developer's fault.. it's all those years that Xfree stagnated.. Windows
left Linux in the dust when it came to video drivers.

Right now 2D and 3D are totally different code bases, totally different APIs. But yet they
have to do very similar tasks on the same exact hardware at the same exact time. Not good.

As far as 2D performance goes.. No video card maker has put any effort in improving it in
years. In very modern cards there is _no_ 2D-only hardware. It will either done by internal
emulation or simply lack any support for 2D acceleration at all.

So a unified driver based on the GPU is going to be needed going forward. One that supports
multiple APIs.

To bad we don't have one yet. Except in very early development. (Gallium3D)

Until we are able to get rid of the schism of 2D vs 3D in Linux/X.org (at the driver level..)
it will not have the stability and performance that you get from Windows or OS X. Not so much
in terms of crashing.. but just in terms of general ugliness, lack of performance, and
difficulty (on the part of driver developers and end users).

One example is during video playback many people will notice that if they use Linux for HD
video there will be occasional tearing and lines across the middle of the screen were you have
overlapping frames and such. This is because there is no way to sync video up with your
refresh rate so that you get a nice solid frame of video ready for each screen refresh.

Why? I donno. The design of Linux drivers simply won't allow it without exceptional difficulty
I guess.

Need good FLOSS drivers for 3D cards (NVIDIA, ATI)

Posted Apr 9, 2008 2:02 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Oh. And it looks like Via has finally come around and decided to help out with driver
development rather then just kinda do everything half-assed and piss of developers that are
trying to make their hardware work good.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=vi...

So that means that we have open source drivers development aided by:

Intel -- open source code and documentation.
ATI -- some open source code and reasonably full documentation.
Via -- we will do what they are doing; see linux.via.com in a month.

(there are two very cool things that Via does well that Linux users can benefit from.. Very
fast hardware encryption engine and decent hardware acceleration for media playback on the
very cheap.)

Nvidia -- ??

It's amazing. Nvidia does have fast drivers for Linux, but they are so proprietary that they
only support Windows for their new multimedia oriented ARM-based platform. This is a market
were Linux outsells Windows for most things.

A well. 3 out of 4 ain't bad. This means that Linux now has documentation for about.. what?
90% of video devices being sold?

At least everybody should be happy that things are moving forward.

(I wonder if OpenBSD will be contributing to 3D drivers now that documentation is avialable..)

Need good FLOSS drivers for 3D cards (NVIDIA, ATI)

Posted Apr 18, 2008 23:22 UTC (Fri) by endecotp (guest, #36428) [Link]

> It looks like Via has finally come around and decided to help out

That is good news.  I have some embedded things with nano-itx boards in, and the scary
"abandonware" nature of the framebuffer driver has been making me think about using a Geode
board instead; I posted about this on LKML (http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/656335)
and got no replies.  Fingers crossed that they take the right approach.

Sync to VBlank

Posted Apr 10, 2008 14:23 UTC (Thu) by dlarrick (subscriber, #5532) [Link]

There are actually two mechanisms to sync to VBlank under XOrg.  OpenGL has the
GLX_SGI_video_sync extension, and DRM has DRM_IOCTL_WAIT_VBLANK .  One or both of these works
on most modern hardware.  Both of these are useable for video output -- MythTV, for example,
will select whichever is available.

Need good FLOSS drivers for 3D cards (NVIDIA, ATI)

Posted Apr 10, 2008 8:14 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

The huge problem with nouveau is they're stuck in a "we'll merge later, it does not work
perfectly now, merging it today would only result in issue reports" stance.

As a result most Linux users do not have access to nouveau, and the merge when it happens is
going to be as difficult as alsa was (we still have people that do not consider alsa the
default linux sound system, and it's due in no little part to alsa having lived as an
optionnal out-of-tree addon so long)

If you don't get yourself mainlined, the rest of the software ecosystem organizes itself
without you.