nouveau (graphics)
nouveau is an X.Org Foundation and freedesktop.org project which was initially based on the obfuscated 2D-only free and open-source "nv" driver, aiming to develop free software drivers for Nvidia graphics cards, by reverse engineering Nvidia's current proprietary drivers for Linux. The name of the project refers to the fact that "nouveau" means "new" in French.[1] The name was suggested by the original author's IRC client's French autoreplace feature which suggested the word "nouveau" when he typed "nv".[2]
Like most other 3D graphics drivers for X.Org, nouveau is implemented as a module and is licensed under the MIT license. It originally used the Direct Rendering Infrastructure of Mesa 3D for rendering 3D computer graphics which allows to accelerate 3D drawing using the graphics processing unit, directly from the 3D application, but in February 2008 the work on DRI support ceased and moved on to the new Gallium3D.[3][4]
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[edit] Adoptation
The nouveau driver has been used as the default open-source driver for Nvidia cards in the Fedora 11 distribution of Linux.[5] It is included in the repository of Ubuntu 9.04[6] and made default in Ubuntu 10.04[7]. It is also included in the experimental repository of Debian.[8] The drivers included in these operating systems, however, do not allow hardware acceleration of 3D operations.
Fedora 13 allows installing the mesa-dri-drivers-experimental package, which activates experimental hardware acceleration for 3d graphics, which was not activated without this package.
On 10 December 2009 nouveau was accepted in the 2.6.33 version of Linux kernel as a staging driver.[9]
[edit] Tools
The project uses several custom made programs for its reverse engineering, such as MmioTrace (Memory Mapped I/O Trace)[10] and REnouveau.
[edit] REnouveau
REnouveau (Reverse Engineering for nouveau)[11] is a program licensed under the GNU GPL (using SDL) that collects data for most of nouveau's reverse engineering work. Users with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers can help the development of nouveau by providing information about the hardware of their NVIDIA cards through REnouveau. REnouveau works by copying the current graphics card MMIO register space, drawing some graphics and taking another copy of the MMIO, and outputting the difference to a text file. It runs about six dozen different tests which the user of the computer then makes a tar.bz2 archive of and submits by e-mail, after which it is automatically transferred to the project's FTP servers for the developers to analyze.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ "nouveau Wiki". 2009-07-07. http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/. Retrieved 2009-09-23.
- ^ "The state of Nouveau, part I". LWN.net. 2008-02-15. http://lwn.net/Articles/269558/. Retrieved 2009-11-24.
- ^ "The state of Nouveau, part 2". LWN.net. 2008-02-26. http://lwn.net/Articles/270830/. Retrieved 2008-03-07.
- ^ "Nouveau Companion 36 - The irregular Nouveau-Development companion". http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/Nouveau_Companion_36. Retrieved 2008-03-07.
- ^ Testing Out The Nouveau Driver On Fedora 11
- ^ Ubuntu 9.04 To Get Nouveau Driver
- ^ "Bug #454821 : Bugs : “xserver-xorg-video-nv” package : Ubuntu". https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-nv/+bug/454821/comments/2. Retrieved 2010-02-24.
- ^ Nouveau nVidia drivers now available in Debian experimental
- ^ "Nouveau To Go Into Linux 2.6.33 Kernel!". Phoronix. 2009-12-11. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nzc5NQ.
- ^ "MmioTrace (Memory Mapped I/O Trace)". nouveau Wiki. http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/MmioTrace.
- ^ "REnouveau (Reverse Engineering for nouveau)". nouveau Wiki. http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/REnouveau.
[edit] External links
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