"On the Phoronix Forums we have been running a Q&A with the developers of the Nouveau project. For those out of the loop or new to Linux, the Nouveau project aims to provide an open-source 2D/3D graphics driver for NVIDIA hardware. After collecting a number of questions from our readers, KoalaBR and Marcheu have answered these questions. The questions range from whether there will be open-source SLI support to asking if NVIDIA has ever contacted the Nouveau developers."
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Member since:2006-04-20
I get where you are coming from, but really, that is life. Old technology is superseded by new technology (in the case of computer graphics, very, very quickly). The burden in terms of time and effort required to support older hardware is just not worthwhile in most cases, and for linux to make serious inroads into the desktop computer OS scene, it needs to be able to support current 3D hardware through a simple driver installation if not out of the box. So the priority for the nouveau team should be to get the latest DX10/openGL3.0 cards working before worrying about obsolete hardware. It is very hard to reverse engineer drivers for 3d hardware, especially when the bulk of the market for that hardware expects full support for all of the features of the latest hardware, not stuff that is several years old.
So while I can empathise with your frustration, unless you are prepared to contribute resources to the project to enable them to work on out of date hardware, I think you will be stuck with the commercial nVidia driver for quite a while longer.
Member since:2007-07-10
I don't understand what you're trying to do with this argument - it is worthwhile for users of older or non-mainstream hardware to have these capabilities, it is for these users that an open-source solution (which can service the long tail of the market) is necessary. Why have nouveau focus on only the latest and greatest, when some just want their cards to 'work'? Your argument would make more sense if you were advocating nvidia to open source their own drivers - and I don't think that ethical quandaries over 'binary blobiness' is what's stopping linux from making inroads on the desktop OS scene.
Member since:2006-06-26
That's life, and life has sad things, what's the matter? ;-)
No, really, what I want to mean is that they drop support unnecessary. There are toons of people with this kind of cards, there are toons of people of *customers* that doesn't reserve to be treated that way. The effort necessary to keep supporting cards like that is minimum, since there's a unified driver to rule them all. I don't know the technical details, perhaps I'm wrong, but if you asked me for a reason for nVidia to drop support I will answer that people on nVidia wants to force their older customers to update their hardware.
But it's not a checked fact, and perhaps the effort necessary it's bigger than I think.
Member since:
2006-06-26
I hope that this project achieve his goals soon. For the mainstream users the nVidia driver is good enough, but nVidia is droping support for older-but-capable hardware. I've got a few years old Geforce 3 Ti200 card, that can run the new WM and Xorg capabilities very smoothly, but nVidia keep us (the [not so] old hardware users) in the "8000 series driver ghetto". The firstest releases of the 9000 series got support for that hardware, but it doesn't work well with a DVI out (a problem already appeared-and-solved in 8000 series), and the lastest releases (the ones with support for the new features) drop support.
So, again, people that resist to make unnecesary hardware update or doesn't represent a important market share are ignored before their hardware become unusable. That's the same thing for bcm43xx hardware and other stuff. This is *sad*.
So thanks a lot for the nouveau guys, and the guys from similar projects.
Edited 2007-09-03 22:56