
Among the
many new features for Fedora 11, a newly added one is Nouveau becoming the default driver for Nvidia cards in
Rawhide. Nouveau is an
effort to create a completely free and open source 3D driver for Nvidia cards. Fedora 7 originally included this driver installed but not enabled by default. Red Hat recently hired Ben Skeggs, one of the primary Nouveau developers and Nouveau driver has been
accepted by the Fedora Engineering team to be the default driver for Nvidia cards with the legacy nv driver as a fallback option. Nouvaeu already supports more chipsets, RANR 1.1 support, Accelerated XRENDER, Textured Video support for many cards that are not covered by the nv driver which has been hampered by a lot of obfuscated code as well. Phoronix has
other details.
Member since:
2005-07-06
We're actually quite confident that this will work fairly smoothly. This is being pushed by Ben Skeggs, who is one of the main developers of nouveau and now works for Red Hat. We intend to test it quite extensively and revert to nv if it turns out to be more problematic.
Note that this is only intended to provide better 2D support. The 3D features of nouveau will not be enabled by default at this point, they're not ready.
We're pretty much aiming for this to at least cause no overall regression in basic hardware support and hopefully to provide an improvement. NVIDIA have got slack with updating the nv driver lately, it doesn't really support the latest NVIDIA chipsets very well, so we need to switch to something better.