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Why is support from nvidia even needed? I remember that there was always this weird thing where graphics drivers were written for X11 instead of being part of t

Why is support from nvidia even needed? I remember that there was always this weird thing where graphics drivers were written for X11 instead of being part of the kernel (or a module) like all other drivers, is this still the case? Why can't they write a kernel (framebuffer?) driver so no specific support is needed for a desktop environment?

peterwwillis 9y ago
Why do you need the NVidia proprietary driver? http://www.pcworld.com/article/2911459/why-nvidia-graphics-cards-are-the-worst-for-open-source-but-the-best-for-linux-gaming.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2911459/why-nvidia-graphics-c... Basically, if you're not a gamer, the open-source Nouveau driver should provide all you need, assuming it works for your card. But parts of your system may stop working, or cause other bugs, from not using the official drivers. edit I might have misinterpreted your question, so here's an alternate answer. If you mean "Why can't we just do 3D rendering with a framebuffer?", a framebuffer is just a copy of the rendered screen in memory. You render it in your local CPU, and then copy it over into video card memory. So it doesn't use hardware rendering, and can work with pretty much any card. If you do want to do hardware rendering (or most any feature of your card at all) you have to write a kernel driver (the DRM) to use the chip, and then some userland software (the DRI) to manipulate that driver, and send data to it somehow from your client app using a standard API for 3d graphics (OpenGL's GLX extension for the X11 protocol). The devil is in the details though, so to work around some limitations, some people wrote new graphics software to allow the client app to render without a "middle man" in the way. That's where you get Wayland.
- ollien 9y ago
  I personally wasn't able to make multimonitor work with nouveau, but the proprietary drivers from RPMFusion well.
  - krylon 9y ago
    FWIW, I use an nVidia GTX960 with the nouveau driver on openSUSE Tumbleweed, with two displays. Basically, it Just Worked(tm) out of the box. Performance is good for regular desktop use, including video playback (then again, my CPU is a Ryzen 1700), 3d gaming performance is not overwhelming, though. Plus, Kerbal Space Program gives me weird display errors and sometimes manages to crash Xorg. I am not much of a gamer, though, so I can live with this arrangement.
- cerved 9y ago
  CUDA
- byuu 9y ago
  I'd love to use nouveau. Unfortunately, they aren't concerned with anything other than Linux, so there's no FreeBSD port for me to use.
problems 9y ago
Indeed they can, For basic framebuffer, but for doing 3d acceleration, to get many nice desktop effects people are used to you basically have to speak their proprietary protocol to the GPU. You can do a little better than framebuffer, like the "nv" Xorg driver, but it's still not really sufficient for composting, video playback and other things commonly expected from a desktop OS. There's an effort to reverse engineer this called nouveau, they've done a surprisingly good job in a surprisingly short time, but it's still far from perfect.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  > There's an effort to reverse engineer this called nouveau, they've done a surprisingly good job in a surprisingly short time, but it's still far from perfect. Nvidia has been putting a lot of hurdles on their efforts since the Pascal GPUs. If you look and pre-Pascal GPU the performance of Nouveau is really impressive, but Pascal GPUs are crawling to go beyond a few frames per second. It's really sad.

peterwwillis 9y ago

Why do you need the NVidia proprietary driver? http://www.pcworld.com/article/2911459/why-nvidia-graphics-cards-are-the-worst-for-open-source-but-the-best-for-linux-gaming.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/2911459/why-nvidia-graphics-c... Basically, if you're not a gamer, the open-source Nouveau driver should provide all you need, assuming it works for your card. But parts of your system may stop working, or cause other bugs, from not using the official drivers. edit I might have misinterpreted your question, so here's an alternate answer. If you mean "Why can't we just do 3D rendering with a framebuffer?", a framebuffer is just a copy of the rendered screen in memory. You render it in your local CPU, and then copy it over into video card memory. So it doesn't use hardware rendering, and can work with pretty much any card. If you do want to do hardware rendering (or most any feature of your card at all) you have to write a kernel driver (the DRM) to use the chip, and then some userland software (the DRI) to manipulate that driver, and send data to it somehow from your client app using a standard API for 3d graphics (OpenGL's GLX extension for the X11 protocol). The devil is in the details though, so to work around some limitations, some people wrote new graphics software to allow the client app to render without a "middle man" in the way. That's where you get Wayland.

ollien 9y ago
I personally wasn't able to make multimonitor work with nouveau, but the proprietary drivers from RPMFusion well.
- krylon 9y ago
  FWIW, I use an nVidia GTX960 with the nouveau driver on openSUSE Tumbleweed, with two displays. Basically, it Just Worked(tm) out of the box. Performance is good for regular desktop use, including video playback (then again, my CPU is a Ryzen 1700), 3d gaming performance is not overwhelming, though. Plus, Kerbal Space Program gives me weird display errors and sometimes manages to crash Xorg. I am not much of a gamer, though, so I can live with this arrangement.
cerved 9y ago
CUDA
byuu 9y ago
I'd love to use nouveau. Unfortunately, they aren't concerned with anything other than Linux, so there's no FreeBSD port for me to use.

problems 9y ago

Indeed they can, For basic framebuffer, but for doing 3d acceleration, to get many nice desktop effects people are used to you basically have to speak their proprietary protocol to the GPU. You can do a little better than framebuffer, like the "nv" Xorg driver, but it's still not really sufficient for composting, video playback and other things commonly expected from a desktop OS. There's an effort to reverse engineer this called nouveau, they've done a surprisingly good job in a surprisingly short time, but it's still far from perfect.

ekianjo 9y ago
> There's an effort to reverse engineer this called nouveau, they've done a surprisingly good job in a surprisingly short time, but it's still far from perfect. Nvidia has been putting a lot of hurdles on their efforts since the Pascal GPUs. If you look and pre-Pascal GPU the performance of Nouveau is really impressive, but Pascal GPUs are crawling to go beyond a few frames per second. It's really sad.