The Nouveau driver graduates from staging

[Posted March 23, 2012 by corbet]

Linus has merged a patch which moves the Nouveau graphics driver out of its symbolic location in staging and into the mainline proper; among other things, this move is an indication that no further ABI breaks (which have not happened for a while anyway) are expected. Also merged is initial mode-setting support for the just-released "Kepler" chipset from NVIDIA.

("Symbolic" because the Nouveau code has never been in the staging tree; only the configuration option was placed there.)

The Nouveau driver graduates from staging

Posted Mar 24, 2012 15:02 UTC (Sat) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm using Nouveau on my Thinkpad running RHEL 6.2, and it's great. I hook up a project or external monitor, press Fn-F7 a few time to switch to the mode I want, and it Just Works. So much better integrated than the NV proprietary driver.

Sure, I'm not playing any 3D games with Nouveau but that's not what I use the laptop for anyway.

Nice job!

The Nouveau driver graduates from staging

Posted Mar 25, 2012 12:37 UTC (Sun) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link]

Surprisingly, I can play many games like Darkplaces and Q3A. The performance of the proprietary driver is better, but I'm pretty impressed at how fast Nouveau is.

Weird colors

Posted Mar 25, 2012 4:49 UTC (Sun) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (3 responses)

I've been using Noveau for a long time. It's been working without hiccups, but the colors are wrong. Tux's beak and feet (look to the upper left corner of this window) are purple, wood is red, and XVideo is mostly black. Text and background solid colors are normal. Does anybody else get this, or do I just have busted hardware?

Weird colors

Posted Mar 25, 2012 7:25 UTC (Sun) by shalem (subscriber, #4062) [Link] (2 responses)

Hi,

I've been using the nouveau driver for a long time too, and colors are fine for me. What I would do if I were you is:
1) Install the proprietary driver (a pain I know), and try to reproduce, if the colors are good there it likely is a nouveau bug and not your hardware
2) Install Fedora 16 or 17 (you don't need to switch distros just clear 4G of hd space, do a livecd to harddisk install, and fully update it)
3) If the bug is still there with a fully up2date Fedora file a bug against xorg-x11-drv-nouveau in Fedora's bugzilla. Then hopefully Ben Skeggs will take a look and eventually fix it (he may first need some help from you to gather various info).

Note this is not meant as a shameless plug for Fedora, I just don't know any other distro which maintains nouveau as actively as Fedora does.

Regards,

Hans

Weird colors

Posted Mar 25, 2012 9:06 UTC (Sun) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (1 responses)

Is it that difficult to install the driver from source (git)?

Weird colors

Posted Mar 25, 2012 15:17 UTC (Sun) by balajig81 (guest, #48030) [Link]

The driver is part of the kernel and compiling the kernel and doing a modprobe @ init should do the thing

The Nouveau driver graduates from staging

Posted Mar 25, 2012 17:48 UTC (Sun) by arekm (guest, #4846) [Link] (1 responses)

Major nouveau problem some time ago was suspend to ram support. Is that working and stable on all nouveau supported chipsets now?

Suspending with The Nouveau driver that graduated from staging

Posted Mar 25, 2012 22:04 UTC (Sun) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

Works for me (nVidia Corporation GT218 [NVS 3100M]) .... 9 times out of 10.

More accurately, 90 times out of 100, and those 10 times were all since I started using a second monitor via the DisplayPort. I haven't found out yet if there is a deeper pattern - e.g. maybe suspend fails if I unplug first, but not if I "xrandr --output DP-1 --off" first.

Before the second monitor, the only problem I had was that sometime it would resume with a black screen and I had to switch virtual consoles away and back to get it working again.

The Nouveau driver graduates from staging

Posted Mar 26, 2012 1:28 UTC (Mon) by motk (subscriber, #51120) [Link] (5 responses)

Major problem for me with the Nouveau driver is that the binary driver also does fan management. Without it, the card fans just blast away at full speed, and they're _loud_. There's some tickets in about it, but nobody seems to care much about it.

The Nouveau driver graduates from staging

Posted Mar 26, 2012 7:53 UTC (Mon) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link] (4 responses)

> There's some tickets in about it, but nobody seems to care much about it.

With the kernel 3.3 there is manual fan management (see this commit).

The Nouveau driver graduates from staging

Posted Mar 26, 2012 8:31 UTC (Mon) by linusw (subscriber, #40300) [Link] (3 responses)

It seems unlikely that the fan management can be used safely without proper thermal measurements to back its policies?

The Nouveau driver graduates from staging

Posted Mar 26, 2012 16:32 UTC (Mon) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (2 responses)

That probably depends on whether you believe you understand your usage profile (if the box just sits there running a terminal window it's hard to imagine how that would generate enough heat to need fans running at high speed) and whether nVidia's hardware responds to overheat conditions by catching fire, suffering permanent damage, shutting down until reset or just automatically reducing clock speeds.

After all there _are_ sensors, the only issue is how much the local firmware on the device does. It might (like many modern CPUs) be capable of protecting itself from excess temperature no matter how bad the cooling is. In that case incorrectly setting the fan speed would at worst result in a sudden loss of picture as the GPU shuts off abruptly, a "learning opportunity" for the operator, and a good reason for Nouveau to keep working on this problem, but not really dangerous.

The Nouveau driver graduates from staging

Posted Mar 27, 2012 11:57 UTC (Tue) by Lennie (guest, #49641) [Link]

Phoronix was at the FOSDEM 2012 talk about the Nouveau driver:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tNeVp7lMAo#t=43m13s

The URL should skip to where they talk about powermanagement/fans.

The Nouveau driver graduates from staging

Posted Mar 29, 2012 7:19 UTC (Thu) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

If you don't have temperature driven fan management (which I think remains the best way to control fans), the safe thing to do is what overclockers do:

- find suitable stress test programs that drive both CPU and GPU as hard as possible
- manually adjust the fan speeds until temperature is within safe limits for both CPU and GPU - maybe go for 10-15C below maximums to allow for really hot weather up to 40C, depending on current room temperature

This will be noisier than a temperature driven fan setup, of course - this may help: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fan_Speed_Control - and many laptops have specific fan control tools. GkrellM and other tools report fan speeds from GPU as well as CPU.