On the possible merging of Nouveau

Some sites are reporting that the Nouveau driver (a reverse-engineered 3D driver for NVIDIA hardware) will be merged for 2.6.33. It is worth pointing out that this has not (yet) happened. Here's what has happened: the posting of the DRM tree for 2.6.33 drew a complaint from Linus that Nouveau was not there. A long discussion followed, culminating in the posting of a "Nouveau pony" tree. Linus may yet pull that tree, but it's worth noting that it's not a complete solution.

As was discussed at the 2009 Kernel Summit, NVIDIA hardware requires the downloading of a large binary blob to function. This blob was taken from NVIDIA's proprietary drivers. Nobody really knows what it is (though most guess that it is firmware), and nobody knows what sort of copyright restrictions might apply to it. So, for now, nobody's really willing to sign off on it for merging into the mainline. As a result, this blob is not part of the new tree; potential users will have to obtain it separately. Even this way, though, the merging of Nouveau would make it more visible and, hopefully, encourage more testing and development.

Update: Linus did pull the Nouveau tree into the mainline.

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