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It is, it has been merged http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=...

Edited 2009-12-11 23:44 UTC

It's used by Fedora for the last couple of releases in place of Nv driver and we have gotten very good feedback in general and features are way ahead, including support for kernel mode setting which even the proprietary driver doesn't support. I recommend filing bug reports on problems. In my experience, they have been quickly followed up with fixes.

I will ignore you since you often misrepresent facts and just troll. I haven't ignored anyone who gave specific feedback. I said, we have in general received very positive feedback and that is absolutely true.

Edited 2009-12-12 01:44 UTC

Oh, I haven't retried Fedora since we talked about it black-screening on installation last week or so. An observation with I made about F12 which you, as per your usual poclicy, tried to deflect with claims that I was just lying, etc.

It's not working for Bosco, and you simply claim that Nouveau works.

Why has Fedora been so keen on shipping it while withholding it from the mainline kernel, anyway? Linus certainly seems disaproving of Fedora's behavior in the matter? Looks like it has now been merged. But Linus's statement was this:

"I've heard all the excuses. If it isn't ready, they shouldn't ship it to millions of people. And if it's ready, they should work on merging it."

Is it ready? Or now that you've been shipping it to millions of people, was merging the only PR accectable option that Red Had Legal would approve?

Edited 2009-12-12 01:57 UTC

"Oh, I haven't retried Fedora since we talked about it black-screening on installation last week or so. A observation with I made about F12 which you, as per your usual poclicy, tried to deflect with claims that I was just lying, etc."

Nope. I asked for more hardware information which you refused to provide.

"It's not working for Bosco, and you simply claim that Nouveau works"

Nope. Didn't claim it worked for everyone.

Linus's question was clearly answered by Dave Airlie from Red Hat and Alan Cox. Perhaps you missed the latter parts of the thread. Feel free to continue reading.

Edited 2009-12-12 02:02 UTC

Whatever, Rahul. And for someone who claims to be ignoring me as often as you do, we certainly generate some long back-and-forth threads. :-)

Your comment happened to be directly addressed at me and I responded to it. Factual corrections shall still be made from time to time.

For someone who has repeatedly said that he's left Fedora behind for Ubuntu on many occasions, you talk about Fedora a hell of a lot.


Pot kettle black. Linus is right to give them a kick, but there are a few other distributions you can easily apply that maxim to several times over.

Quite frankly, and Linux distribution is at all perfect IMO, it's just nice that Red Hat is actually writing code so they can be criticised for not merging it. I suppose if you don't write any then you can avoid that. :-)

Bug reports have been filed. Will give nouveau a try again when the F13 alpha livecd shows up.

As an experiment, I have downloaded Kubuntu 10.4 Alpha 1. As you might expect, it is buggy ... but not so buggy that it prevents me from posting this while running it. Kubuntu 10.4 Alpha 1 features the 2.6.32 kernel, which has the open source 3D drivers for ATI.

http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=05813

At first, it didn't work for me. Bummer.

However I enabled the xorg-edgers ppa for lucid using this repository information:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/xorg-edgers/ppa/ubuntu lucid main

then I did an "sudo aptitude upgrade" and now it works. Hooray for the good guys.



OK, so it is still raw, but nevertheless I do I have an open source 3D graphics drivers running for my ATI card.

Kubuntu itself really flies on this machine now.

Sadly, kwin (in KDE 4.4 beta) as yet doesn't seem to realise that there is a 3D graphics driver running. I have not yet got a composited desktop. Apparently, though, compiz is said to work OK. So I think I might be looking into running KDE with compiz instead of kwin for the moment, right after I file some bug reports.

Edited 2009-12-12 09:57 UTC

Turn on "disable compatibility check"
in kwin config.

Tried that. No go.

Tried that. No go. "

Updated today ... improved drivers, new pieces of xorg, new version of kwin, but still no composited desktop.

Close, but no cigar yet.

Don't we all just love backseat drivers.

Well, X is powerful. Its slow an imperfect, but I love the client/server side of it. The ability to show windows on different computer with only DISPLAY=192.168... or SSH -Y is great. It make it easy to do cool things with multiple computer. Managing an headless server without full remote desktop like RDP or VNC is terrible in windows, but in *nix using X (not OSX), its just so great.

X is not the worst Linux feature, ALSA/Pulse combo are. X is just out of context for gaming and playing movies. It show is true strength only when you push it to the limit.

Yeah, but Pulse makes ALSA not fail, and I can go to OSS4 if I really want to. If I moved to FreeBSD, 90% of Xorg/Xfree will be the same.

What exactly are you saying here? What is wrong with RDP? It's easy to setup, encrypted and can connect to Server core. But there are other ways to connect if you don't want to use it.

OSX has ssh built in. Connecting to a headless mac is easy.

It seems like you are trying to think of problems that don’t exist in Windows/OSX to make X look better.



You mean the consumer context where it is used 99% of the time? A powerful graphics system can play videos and provide remote connections with ease. That isn't X.

Sound in Linux isn't a technical problem, it's political. Too many cooks in the kitchen.

X-Windows on the other hand needs to be redesigned from the ground up based on the typical needs of users.

Xorg/Xfree is also political. YWindows looked cool, and Wayland would have been a great core to work from. Have an X API layer on top, and go on from there.

X doesn't need to be slow.

For example, what version of Google Chrome is the fastest version ? The Linux version is faster then Mac OS X and Windows. They found part of the reason was X was better suited.

http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev/browse_thread/thread/d8...

I didn't say X was slow. Where it has been slow, that's being dealt with quite well (XCB, FI). I generally haven't found the speed of X to be an issue on any system I've used, unless I get stuck with a VESA driver, which hasn't been the case for a long time (the worst case is usually fbdev, which is pretty good).

Any display system needs at least two, and sometimes three buffers, where after a buffer is written to, it is displayed upon the next screen refresh, so that partial draws do not create obvious and annoying tearing artifacts. As it is, you can only be reasonably assured that can work with Intel or nVidia under X. IoW, proper vsync should be a core feature, that just works, unless specifically turned off. I just said that in a shorter way . Instead, I can run Compiz on an old PC, but not play back a DVD w/o tearing. Much like gapless audio playback taking so long to become common, I see it as a regression, and lots of, "oh, shiny!" going on.

Also, I was in an, "eh, it'll be OK if it becomes flame bait," mood .

Edited 2009-12-12 11:47 UTC

Just look at this bug:

Xorg crashing after identifying a mouse as a keyboard
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=479122

A windowing system should not blow up if it is confused by what is plugged in. It should simply wait for input that it understands.

Bugs like these make me very leery of the X codebase. I can post some more bugs of X freaking out over input devices if anyone would like.

Oh noes, a bug: surely no other software platforms have those.

I think I can predict what your response to this is going to be, but, X has been making very good progress over the last few years. It's come a long way from a bad state. Sure there's road left to travel, but it is moving forward, and at a decent clip. The X server's gotten a lot, a lot smarter about auto-configuring itself, about re-configuring itself when things change, and about surviving problems. It's improved to the point where Slackware, an extremely conservative distro by any measure, ships without an xorg.conf file, and just trusts the X Server to be able to sort everything out when it starts up -- and that actually works.

X is still a weak-point in most Linux distros, but it's improved dramatically over where it was, say, four years ago. It's almost on par with the experiences I've had with Vista's own graphics layer (which has provided me with some spectacular, random crashes -- like, trying to cancel a stalled file copy to a USB drive bringing down the whole Vista shell). Calling for the whole thing to be thrown out might've been appropriate four years ago -- but not now. There's nothing inherently wrong with X's design, it's code-quality problems are being resolved, and it's picking up the new features that it needs too, if not incredibly quickly.

So... if the Linux Hater's Club could get some more modern talking points, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Xorg is a best of breed X11 implementation. I don't think anyone who criticizes it would argue that. The problem is that the graphics stack is irrevocably wedded to a window server/network protocol. It makes about as much sense as coupling the physical and logical storage layers to the NFS protocol. Anyone who suggested that would be considered insane, yet the same exact design lives on and is even defended in the case of Xorg.


Keep in mind that not all of us who criticize X do so because we hate Linux. Personally, I'd love to see the Linux graphics situation improve and I have the knowledge, experience, and motivation to contribute to it. But as long as the powers that be are backed by the community and continue down a path that I consider to be a dead end, I can't justify committing my time. The tragic part is that I'm sure there are many others just like me.

If you truly don't like XWindows, then you can always pick up where the YWindows group left off. It's still open source & it's stalled, so it's just sitting there waiting for some motivated person to pick it up, dust it off, & polish it up.

Umm... it has absolutely no 3d drivers. And it has a horrible design. Wayland would be a much better choice.

So implement the infrastructure for it. If it weren't for our fascination with reinventing the wheel, where would open source be today? Oh yeah... a lot further along than we are. ;-)

(sorry if I offended anyone)

I like the idea of removing X windowing system for Linux because it seems that the sudden popularity of Linux degraded the quality of X.

Sudden popularity of Linux did not degrade the quality of X but it is moving things against what might have been considered the linux community ideals a few years ago.
gnome-shell for example is a direct result of the sudden popularity of Linux. It obsoletes certain graphic cards that cannot do desktop compositing and it makes sure of JS in a desktop application something we wouldn't have accepted a few years ago (many still won't today).

All this excitement over a 2d driver makes me feel like it's 1996 again.

Edited 2009-12-13 14:10 UTC