6 ms·

Open source Linux driver supports 3D acceleration with all GeForce GPUs

104 points by w1ntermute 14y ago

beagle3 14y ago
Very impressive. (Still no fan control; and a few other features missing - but great progress has been made)
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  I have an Intel graphics chipset in my new laptop, and it makes a WORLD of difference being able to use open source drivers. They run on first boot, and even on live CDs. And no more funny pieces of software for configuring graphics-related stuff - all the DE/WM standard stuff can be used.
  - mmastrac 14y ago
    Agreed. This will go a long way to helping the first boot experience. Even if this driver is just capable of giving 90+% of users a slick compositing UI experience (without even worrying about gaming at this point), it will be extremely valuable.
  - akurilin 14y ago
    What's the most compatible high-performance graphics card for Linux these days? Would that be something by Intel based on their recent effort to provide OSS drivers?
    - simcop2387 14y ago
      Currently that would be Intel if you want OS drivers. Along with supporting more of the OpenGL standard (i think in dev they're at 3.1 or 3.2 now from what i've heard, which beats most of the other drivers currently) they are also doing fairly well performance wise lately too from what i've seen benchmarked. They're really come a long way and kudos to them.
    - dmm 14y ago
      The "radeon" driver supports everything up to the "Northern islands" series very well. Check out http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature for details. Support for the "Southern island" series should be coming soon. And AMD is working to make future driver releases coincide with the hw releases. The free drivers are still a little slower than the proprietary drivers but they have more features such as KMS. EDIT: To answer your question directly, the Radeon HD 6970 or 6990 are the fastest northern islands cards and are well supported by the radeon xorg driver. I don't know if the driver can use both of the gpus in the 6990 though. The southern island chips should be supported very soon though, which are the HD7750 - HD7970 .
      - cuu508 14y ago
        radeon driver is OK on single head, but has broken power management on multi-head. Hot, noisy and power hungry. Ironically, faster card---bigger problems :-) [1]. Proprietary AMD driver used to have serious issues with gnome-shell, but sometime last year they finally got fixed. [1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49981 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49981
      - vacri 14y ago
        I made the mistake of not confirming the vid card in my new work PC and it's a southern island chipset (Pitcairn). I use two 1920x1200 monitors and the open-source drivers can do that with no hardware acceleration. But if I use the proprietary drivers... I am limited to a total resolution of 1920x1920. That's not a typo, that's the limit it gives me - a square resolution I've never heard of in my life. I am looking forward to the open-source support and it can't get here fast enough - running a compositing desktop puts the eight cores of the i7 at ~50% CPU :) (though I live mostly in terminals, so I don't feel it beyond a touch of UI sluggishness sometimes)
        dmm 14y ago
        The proprietary drivers suck because AMD is focusing on the open source ones. Big changes are coming for the OS driver. They've been making vertical changes that don't break down into small releases well.
    - morsch 14y ago
      Does most compatible imply open-source? The proprietary Nvidia drivers tend to support recent high-end hardware, and they're pretty good in terms of compatibility; as in everything works. Including xrandr, these days. Incidentally, I was shocked to find out that connecting three displays just worked on my current setup, not long ago this took hours of crazy old-school X server tweaking to maybe get it to work.
EvilLook 14y ago
It still doesn't work on my card. Hurray for "progress".
- dignan 14y ago
  Please write something useful. Do you have a card that is supposed to be affected by this change? Are you running the right software/software version? Have you filed a bug report? Or do you just enjoying typing and negativity that much?
  - EvilLook 14y ago
    There has already been a bug filed on the bugzilla for nouveau. I'm not going to file another and spam their bug tracker. That's my positive contribution - making sure it's reported and verifying that the error the bug reporter sees is what I see. So stop being such an unhelpful, assuming asshole. You won't advance the cause of free software that way. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43562 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43562
- VeejayRampay 14y ago
  Yeah +1. With the ridiculously high amount of money you spend every year on those goddamn OSS devs, how DARE THEY not support every obscure chipset under the sun, HOW DARE THEY.
mbell 14y ago
Have they fixed re-clocking yet? Last I knew nouveau couldn't change the clock speed on many GPUs leaving them either locked at a very low clock, performing poorly, or locked at max clock, chewing through power.
- GICodeWarrior 14y ago
  The article says, No. "Furthermore, the driver can't switch between the various graphics chip and memory speeds with many current cards and often causes the graphics hardware to run at the slowest operating speed..."
lifeguard 14y ago
"The open source Linux drivers from AMD and Intel can also use the 3D capabilities of almost any graphics chip." Does anyone know if this will be true for the Mali-400 GPU in the ARM branch?
- wmf 14y ago
  I think what was meant was that the AMD driver supports almost any ATI/AMD GPU and the Intel driver supports almost any Intel GPU. For Mali you can try the lima driver.
  - lifeguard 14y ago
    Excellent info! Thanks.
cookiecaper 14y ago
For those familiar with Linux development, the whole article could basically be summed up with: "Nouveau can now generate firmware for all GeForce GPUs on the market, including Fermi and Kepler SKUs". Yay! This is good progress, but not really earth-shattering; it would have been expected.
- primitur 14y ago
  Its earth-shattering because its an entirely volunteer project, where once there was nothing but proprietary blobs for us to run. This is significant because 3D-acceleration has been an Achilles heel in the Linux desktop world for ages .. and now the community has sorted it. This is GREAT news!
  - cookiecaper 14y ago
    It's not earth-shattering. This is nothing new; several older models have gone through the same process over the years. It has been happening for a long time. This article is just exaggerating the real news item: firmware can be supplied by nouveau for all available SKUs, including Kepler/Fermi chips. nouveau is an awesome project, but this is not a huge thing. It's not going to make Linux gaming explode overnight. It's just normal iterative progress, which, don't get me wrong, is great and all, but it's not a big deal like this article suggests.
binarycrusader 14y ago
For some definition of "supports". The last two or three releases of Ubuntu have used the Nouveau driver by default for the LiveCD, which causes my system to hardlock (known, unresolved issue for almost two years now) so I've had to pass special kernel boot flags to disable it and use the VESA driver instead to install and then switch to the nVidia driver afterwards. Realistically though, I don't think it's ever going to be practical to use the Nouveau driver. No Cg support, no CUDA support, and performance will always be a fraction of nVidia's driver. That isn't to say that I don't wish them well, I do. But I still think it's foolhardy at best to ever expect this to be truly competitive with nVidia's proprietary drivers.
- nodata 14y ago
  Did you bug report this in launchpad?
  - aviraldg 14y ago
    What do you think "known, unresolved issue for almost two years now" means?
    - nodata 14y ago
      I don't know. That you read someone else's bug report? Can you link to it?
      - EvilLook 14y ago
        Here's the bug that affects me! Newly reported, but similar to all previous issues I've had with nouveau: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43562 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43562 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-nouveau/+bug/689507 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video... (Gee, thanks Ubuntu for expiring this bug. It's not like there's been no activity because NOBODY IS FUCKING WORKING ON IT or anything!)
connery 14y ago
Noveau isn't so bad for 2D. For 3D, you do kind of need the blob, though. I'm glad the devs are working on it, though.

104 points by w1ntermute 14y ago

beagle3 14y ago

Very impressive. (Still no fan control; and a few other features missing - but great progress has been made)

w1ntermute 14y ago
I have an Intel graphics chipset in my new laptop, and it makes a WORLD of difference being able to use open source drivers. They run on first boot, and even on live CDs. And no more funny pieces of software for configuring graphics-related stuff - all the DE/WM standard stuff can be used.
- mmastrac 14y ago
  Agreed. This will go a long way to helping the first boot experience. Even if this driver is just capable of giving 90+% of users a slick compositing UI experience (without even worrying about gaming at this point), it will be extremely valuable.
- akurilin 14y ago
  What's the most compatible high-performance graphics card for Linux these days? Would that be something by Intel based on their recent effort to provide OSS drivers?
  - simcop2387 14y ago
    Currently that would be Intel if you want OS drivers. Along with supporting more of the OpenGL standard (i think in dev they're at 3.1 or 3.2 now from what i've heard, which beats most of the other drivers currently) they are also doing fairly well performance wise lately too from what i've seen benchmarked. They're really come a long way and kudos to them.
  - dmm 14y ago
    The "radeon" driver supports everything up to the "Northern islands" series very well. Check out http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature http://www.x.org/wiki/RadeonFeature for details. Support for the "Southern island" series should be coming soon. And AMD is working to make future driver releases coincide with the hw releases. The free drivers are still a little slower than the proprietary drivers but they have more features such as KMS. EDIT: To answer your question directly, the Radeon HD 6970 or 6990 are the fastest northern islands cards and are well supported by the radeon xorg driver. I don't know if the driver can use both of the gpus in the 6990 though. The southern island chips should be supported very soon though, which are the HD7750 - HD7970 .
    - cuu508 14y ago
      radeon driver is OK on single head, but has broken power management on multi-head. Hot, noisy and power hungry. Ironically, faster card---bigger problems :-) [1]. Proprietary AMD driver used to have serious issues with gnome-shell, but sometime last year they finally got fixed. [1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49981 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=49981
    - vacri 14y ago
      I made the mistake of not confirming the vid card in my new work PC and it's a southern island chipset (Pitcairn). I use two 1920x1200 monitors and the open-source drivers can do that with no hardware acceleration. But if I use the proprietary drivers... I am limited to a total resolution of 1920x1920. That's not a typo, that's the limit it gives me - a square resolution I've never heard of in my life. I am looking forward to the open-source support and it can't get here fast enough - running a compositing desktop puts the eight cores of the i7 at ~50% CPU :) (though I live mostly in terminals, so I don't feel it beyond a touch of UI sluggishness sometimes)
      - dmm 14y ago
        The proprietary drivers suck because AMD is focusing on the open source ones. Big changes are coming for the OS driver. They've been making vertical changes that don't break down into small releases well.
  - morsch 14y ago
    Does most compatible imply open-source? The proprietary Nvidia drivers tend to support recent high-end hardware, and they're pretty good in terms of compatibility; as in everything works. Including xrandr, these days. Incidentally, I was shocked to find out that connecting three displays just worked on my current setup, not long ago this took hours of crazy old-school X server tweaking to maybe get it to work.

EvilLook 14y ago

It still doesn't work on my card. Hurray for "progress".

dignan 14y ago
Please write something useful. Do you have a card that is supposed to be affected by this change? Are you running the right software/software version? Have you filed a bug report? Or do you just enjoying typing and negativity that much?
- EvilLook 14y ago
  There has already been a bug filed on the bugzilla for nouveau. I'm not going to file another and spam their bug tracker. That's my positive contribution - making sure it's reported and verifying that the error the bug reporter sees is what I see. So stop being such an unhelpful, assuming asshole. You won't advance the cause of free software that way. https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43562 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43562
VeejayRampay 14y ago
Yeah +1. With the ridiculously high amount of money you spend every year on those goddamn OSS devs, how DARE THEY not support every obscure chipset under the sun, HOW DARE THEY.

mbell 14y ago

Have they fixed re-clocking yet? Last I knew nouveau couldn't change the clock speed on many GPUs leaving them either locked at a very low clock, performing poorly, or locked at max clock, chewing through power.

GICodeWarrior 14y ago
The article says, No. "Furthermore, the driver can't switch between the various graphics chip and memory speeds with many current cards and often causes the graphics hardware to run at the slowest operating speed..."

lifeguard 14y ago

"The open source Linux drivers from AMD and Intel can also use the 3D capabilities of almost any graphics chip." Does anyone know if this will be true for the Mali-400 GPU in the ARM branch?

wmf 14y ago
I think what was meant was that the AMD driver supports almost any ATI/AMD GPU and the Intel driver supports almost any Intel GPU. For Mali you can try the lima driver.
- lifeguard 14y ago
  Excellent info! Thanks.

cookiecaper 14y ago

For those familiar with Linux development, the whole article could basically be summed up with: "Nouveau can now generate firmware for all GeForce GPUs on the market, including Fermi and Kepler SKUs". Yay! This is good progress, but not really earth-shattering; it would have been expected.

primitur 14y ago
Its earth-shattering because its an entirely volunteer project, where once there was nothing but proprietary blobs for us to run. This is significant because 3D-acceleration has been an Achilles heel in the Linux desktop world for ages .. and now the community has sorted it. This is GREAT news!
- cookiecaper 14y ago
  It's not earth-shattering. This is nothing new; several older models have gone through the same process over the years. It has been happening for a long time. This article is just exaggerating the real news item: firmware can be supplied by nouveau for all available SKUs, including Kepler/Fermi chips. nouveau is an awesome project, but this is not a huge thing. It's not going to make Linux gaming explode overnight. It's just normal iterative progress, which, don't get me wrong, is great and all, but it's not a big deal like this article suggests.

binarycrusader 14y ago

For some definition of "supports". The last two or three releases of Ubuntu have used the Nouveau driver by default for the LiveCD, which causes my system to hardlock (known, unresolved issue for almost two years now) so I've had to pass special kernel boot flags to disable it and use the VESA driver instead to install and then switch to the nVidia driver afterwards. Realistically though, I don't think it's ever going to be practical to use the Nouveau driver. No Cg support, no CUDA support, and performance will always be a fraction of nVidia's driver. That isn't to say that I don't wish them well, I do. But I still think it's foolhardy at best to ever expect this to be truly competitive with nVidia's proprietary drivers.

nodata 14y ago
Did you bug report this in launchpad?
- aviraldg 14y ago
  What do you think "known, unresolved issue for almost two years now" means?
  - nodata 14y ago
    I don't know. That you read someone else's bug report? Can you link to it?
    - EvilLook 14y ago
      Here's the bug that affects me! Newly reported, but similar to all previous issues I've had with nouveau: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43562 https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=43562 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-nouveau/+bug/689507 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video... (Gee, thanks Ubuntu for expiring this bug. It's not like there's been no activity because NOBODY IS FUCKING WORKING ON IT or anything!)

connery 14y ago

Noveau isn't so bad for 2D. For 3D, you do kind of need the blob, though. I'm glad the devs are working on it, though.