Nouveau To Enter The Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Kernel (Phoronix)

[Posted November 23, 2009 by jake]

Phoronix is reporting that Ubuntu 10.04 will ship with the Nouveau driver for NVIDIA graphics hardware. Nouveau is a reverse-engineered driver that is released as free software—unlike the NVIDIA-provided drivers. "With Ubuntu 9.04 it became easier to use the Nouveau driver with Ubuntu Linux as a snapshot of its DDX driver (xf86-video-nouveau) and its kernel DRM code were packaged up and made available through its package repositories, which continues to be the case in Ubuntu 9.10. Though after the Ubuntu Developer Summit last week for 10.04 'Lucid Lynx', Canonical is now going to put Nouveau into the kernel by default. Not too many details beyond that or their intentions are known at this time, but Nouveau developers are currently being asked about the matter."

Nouveau To Enter The Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Kernel (Phoronix)

Posted Nov 23, 2009 18:17 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (4 responses)

It has been the default in Fedora for the past couple of releases and has made very rapid progress. Good to see more distros joining the party. Hopefully they will invest in it and help improve it as well instead of directing users to the proprietary drivers.

Nouveau To Enter The Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Kernel (Phoronix)

Posted Nov 23, 2009 20:11 UTC (Mon) by xav (guest, #18536) [Link]

Fedora is already investing quite a lot: RedHat employs some nouveau devs (I don't think Ubuntu
or others do that).

Nouveau To Enter The Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Kernel (Phoronix)

Posted Nov 23, 2009 20:21 UTC (Mon) by opalmirror (subscriber, #23465) [Link] (2 responses)

Nouveau's integration in Fedora 12 is excellent, both in framebuffer mode in graphical boot and full integration with gnome. I only wish that video played without jerky dropouts. nVIDIA's proprietary driver will work in Fedora, and full screen video runs fine, but I have to delete nouveau from the initramfs, losing the framebuffer, dropping back to text-based booting, and its integration with the gnome desktop requires frobbing through the proprietary config tools for things like adding and dropping a second display. I will drop it in an instant once nouveau has smooth full-screen video support. Yes, I'm one of *those* people willing to sully my free OS with nonfree components. Sinner!

Nouveau To Enter The Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Kernel (Phoronix)

Posted Nov 23, 2009 22:18 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

I hope meanwhile that you have filed a bug report on the problems you are facing. It gets better over time with good feedback.

jerky video with nouveau

Posted Nov 28, 2009 7:08 UTC (Sat) by tkil (guest, #1787) [Link]

opalmirror wrote:
I only wish that video played without jerky dropouts.

I chatted with one of the main developers on IRC a few weeks back, and spent some quality time with oprofile and friends. Apparently, nouveau does not yet implement tiling. That means that the data is getting written linearly; for a sufficiently large screen*, the time cost of setting up, initiating, and cleaning up the DMA for each line is enough that it can't keep up with the frame rate.

* My screen is 1600x1200 DVI-D to an NV44A AGP card, on a 1.9GHz P4, and mplayer starts freaking out if the playback surface is larger than about 1/4th or 1/3rd the total pixels on the screen.

Nouveau To Enter The Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Kernel (Phoronix)

Posted Nov 23, 2009 20:18 UTC (Mon) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link]

I'm having trouble squaring Phoronix's report with "On the DRM kernel modules side, we have an issue with the ctxprogs, previously known as voodoo: we do not know if it can be distributed legally as is, so we are trying to play it safe."