Mandriva: nouveau now default NVIDIA driver

Hi all, and Merry Christmas! :)

Nouveau is now used by default as the driver for NVIDIA cards, when
proprietary driver is not in use [2].

Please test the driver on your system and report back, even if you are
normally using the proprietary driver.

You can try nouveau by going to X Server settings in MCC (or running
XFdrake), going to the graphics card list and selecting "nouveau" under
"Xorg" (if you are up-to-date, selecting your card under "NVIDIA" and
declining to use the proprietary driver has the same effect). You'll
need to reboot or unload the nvidia kernel module.

Alternatively, you can do it manually by installing
x11-driver-video-nouveau, setting Driver to "nouveau" in
/etc/X11/xorg.conf, and then running these two commands:
update-alternatives --set gl_conf /etc/ld.so.conf.d/GL/standard.conf
ldconfig -X
Then reboot or unload the nvidia kernel module.

Make sure you have a recent kernel version. Main kernel has nouveau git
from about two weeks ago. TMB kernel has the version which is upstream
in 2.6.33-rc1. A custom TMB kernel with nouveau git from yesterday is
available at
http://kenobi.mandriva.com/~anssi/testing/nouveau-drm/coo... (for use
if you experience problems with the main/tmb versions)

The most important features nouveau[1] brings us are:
- Much better 2D acceleration than nv
- RandR1.2 support (configuring outputs on-the-fly)
- Kernel mode setting (enabled by default)
- TVout on some cards

Suspend is also supported. 3D acceleration is not provided, as it is
currently too unstable.

KMS nouveau module is inserted into initrd when creating an initrd while
running with nouveau driver. This will likely cause problems if
switching back to proprietary driver after such an initrd has been
created, as this seems to not be properly handled by our tools. If
affected, you can add the line "builtins=nouveau" to
"/etc/sysconfig/mkinitrd" and regenerate initrd with command
"bootloader-config --action rebuilt-initrds". This creates an initrd
without nouveau, suitable for use with the proprietary driver.

nv driver is still used for Riva 128 (NV03) cards, that are not
supported by nouveau.

The driver should be automatically switched from nv to nouveau on first
reboot after installation of new ldetect-lst.

[1] http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/

[2] (i.e. the non-free repository is disabled or unavailable, or user
answers "no" when asked whether to use the proprietary driver)

-- 
Anssi Hannula

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