LWN: Comments on "The state of Nouveau, part I"

The state of Nouveau, part I

DarthCthulhu — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:35:13 +0000

As I understand it, originally, XFree86 was supposed to be OS agnostic. The problem, however,
if  you put the driver code into the kernel, X becomes very much reliant on that code. Since
everyone had wildly different ways of  writing kernel drivers, it was decided that the best
way to keep OS-agnosticism would be to have the drivers in userspace, made and maintained by
the XFree86 project. 

As time went on and X became more and more irrelevant except for unix-alikes, historical
inertia, laziness, and plain old pig-headedness from the XFree86 owners kept the aging,
increasingly brittle userspace kernel methodology in place. 

It's no accident that people started talking seriously about video drivers in the kernel only
after XFree86 became a zombie project and x.org was transfered to a saner build system.

The state of Nouveau, part I

wesmo — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 02:52:17 +0000

Most recent nouveau companion is #35 at
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=no...

The state of Nouveau, part I

ortalo — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:22:21 +0000

"the current belief is that GPU initialization, memory management, and mode setting need to migrate to the kernel"

That's not especially related to the Nouveau driver effort, but why did it took 10 years to acknowledge this? (I once was proud of trying to work for the "KGI Project" - but in 1998 experience taught me to refrain from trying to claim it anywhere - except possibly on this site...)