AMD/ATI rejoices

Story: NVIDIA Drops Xf86-video-nv Support: No Open Source for New CardsTotal Replies: 7
Author Content
r_a_trip

Apr 01, 2010
4:34 AM EDT
Strange move from NVidia. Vesa is the lowest common denominator. In essence they are giving up on OOTB Linux Desktop support.

So you'll have to endure horrible visual quality until you are able to install the NVidia blob. Let's hope that Nouveau makes headway.

In the mean time, ATI has an upper hand here with a functional OOTB FOSS driver.
tracyanne

Apr 01, 2010
4:40 AM EDT
What I don't understand is why, given that the blob is merely a way to make a Programable Gate array look like a peice of hardware, no one has sat down and simply designed their own Open Source blob that does the same thing. Or is that what Nouveau is supposed to be?

Sander_Marechal

Apr 01, 2010
7:20 AM EDT
That's exactly what Nouveau is. That's also why Nouveau allows CUDA, that is: to use your GPU as a generic programmable streaming processor for all kinds of work, not just displaying pretty pictures.
bigg

Apr 01, 2010
8:45 AM EDT
I'm learning a lot today. I didn't know Nouveau worked with CUDA. The problem I've got with the proprietary nvidia driver is that I have a GTX 260 and my computer repeatedly freezes for about 15-20 seconds at a time. After the twentieth freeze it starts to get annoying.
Sander_Marechal

Apr 01, 2010
10:02 AM EDT
@bigg: http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/CUDA
hkwint

Apr 01, 2010
10:36 AM EDT
Does anyone know about 3D support of Nouveau drivers? At this particular moment in time, this is a must have for me (trying to learn WebGL).

At the moment the Nouveau scheme says it's "Mostly" done for the NV40 series (my particular setup has a NV43 which translates to a GeForce 6600).

Or maybe I should just try, but I'm a bit weary of screwing something that works, which happens about 30% of the time when I install a new graphics driver.
Sander_Marechal

Apr 01, 2010
3:49 PM EDT
Just try. Make sure you backup your X.org configuration though. If it doesn't it's as easy as dropping to a shell (or booting single user mode), restoring your old configuration and restarting X.
azerthoth

Apr 01, 2010
6:21 PM EDT
@hkwint, if your playing with Gentoo all I can say is have fun arguing with it. Nouveau is rather much a PITA, I finally gave up on it after a day or so of tinkering with it and the 2.6.33 kernel. Someone may have a good how-to up by now, but I discovered about 30 ways how-not-to. including one that required me to step back to a previous kernel just to boot and fix the current kernel.

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