phoronix.com — Nouveau is a community project that is working on producing open-source 3D display drivers for NVIDIA graphics cards. Nouveau is not affiliated with NVIDIA Corporation and is an X.Org Foundation project. While this project is still far from being completed, for this holiday special we are sharing some of our first thoughts on this project.
Dec 25, 2006 View in Crawl 4
stonekeeperDec 26, 2006
Something that should be noted too is that as the official ones are closed source, it makes upgrading kernel versions more tricky.
open_sauceDec 26, 2006
If anyone is interested in supporting this project with a small donation ($10), then you may want to check out a pledgebank page that someone has set up to help the project.<a class="user" href="http://www.pledgebank.com/nouveaudriver">http://www.pledgebank.com/nouveaudriver</a>The aim is to get 1000 people to donate $10 each.Note from the pledge creator:"The Nouveau developers have asked me to be quite specific that this pledge drive is not in any way connected to the official project.The intend has never been to give that impression. The aim has always been to show that when the open source community gets together we can do great feats of charity towards software freedom. A display of putting our money where our mouths are sorta speak.That being said I'm very proud to see the fine pledge rate and I do hope the spirit of charity does bled over in other endeavours."
stonekeeperDec 26, 2006
To be honest, I think most people don't actually care whether the driver they use are proprietory or open source. However, a lot of people will care that their system's ability to work is in some small way linked to the performance of a company. I want my nvidia card to work regardless of Nvidia's ability to run a business.
dot_com_ceoDec 26, 2006
Not well maintained? You must be joking. Nvidia's drivers are very close feature-wise to the Windows versions, following their features, mostly 3 months behind. They're relatively bug free, they work fine and there are constant updates and bug-fixes, I think every three months or so. The installer script is very easy to use, should your distro not supply a kernel module or a dkms rpm. I'm all for open source drivers, I appreciate the need for them, but please keep things in perspective. Nvidia's drivers are fine and they ARE well maintained, and supported, by nvidia.
circlefusionDec 26, 2006
I would imagine that there are some applications where the open source drivers are more useful than the NVidia versions, even though they support fewer features. Some people above posted good examples of some benefits that open source drivers would provide over closed drivers (even with fewer features).
dragDec 26, 2006
""Not well maintained? You must be joking. Nvidia's drivers are very close feature-wise to the Windows versions, following their features, mostly 3 months behind.""Features dont' nessicarially translate to be done well. Personally I prefer security, stability, and openness to something like (for example) anti-alias or SLI support.""They're relatively bug free, they work fine and there are constant updates and bug-fixes, I think every three months or so. The installer script is very easy to use, should your distro not supply a kernel module or a dkms rpm.I'm all for open source drivers, I appreciate the need for them, but please keep things in perspective. Nvidia's drivers are fine and they ARE well maintained, and supported, by nvidia.""I beg to differ. There are a many machine-crash-inducing bugs in nvidia drivers. Many configurations are not well supported. If they work for you, then that's fine. But a quick look at nvnews and my experiances today with a machine that all of a sudden stopped supporting twinview configuration it is obvious that not everybody shares your experiances.
gmorganDec 27, 2006
The main benefit is ease of including them with a distribution. Binary drivers are a PITA and make it extremely difficult for the kernel devs to stabilise the kernel. Having a viable open alternative solves that problem in one meaning the kernel team can move the whole operation forward rather than trying to guess at what sort of mess the closed drivers are making of the kernel.
gmorganDec 27, 2006
TBH, I'm a Linux fan and if even half of that is true (which I don't doubt it is) then locking out Linux is the least of our problems. What we are talking about with TC is the total control of our machines by others. This has so many potential abuses that I shudder just to think of it. Also what if a hacker gains control of Palladium on your machine. Not an inconceivable event. We are entirely dependant on MS producing a totally secure OS to help perform an impossible task in most respects.As for the premium content DRM. Personally I'm of the opinion that the *AA should pay for my clock cycles if they expect my machine to do their anti-piracy protection. Also they should pay all the hardware manufacturers for being forced to cripple their tech. Why again is the tech industry being crippled for the, comparatively small fry, media industry. MS themselves are worth more than the music industry. Is it really worth pissing off your customers for them.Anyway this just strengthens my position of never again buying a CD or DVD from one of these idiots. Their small mindedness is going to cause irreparable damage to the tech industry and become a huge drain on the economy. I personally will not reward them for choking the economy. At least the savings will allow me to put money towards the eventual niche companies that make sane hardware. Never know, we might get them to open their drivers or something daft like that.