nouveau

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Mesa 3D / DRI and Gallium3D have different models of device drivers. However, both share large amounts of free source code

nouveau ( French for "new") is a collection of free drivers for graphics cards from the manufacturer Nvidia in order to be able to use them under the Linux operating system . The development is primarily led by the X.Org Foundation and freedesktop.org .

background

The project started in 2006 with the aim of replacing the previous free driver nv , as it only offered rudimentary functions. In 2010 Nvidia stopped developing nv , but refused to participate in the nouveau project. All necessary information therefore had to be determined by reverse engineering the proprietary driver. The project is unique and extremely complex, since the entire architecture of the graphics processors has to be reproduced.

On September 24, 2013 Nvidia announced that it wanted to support the nouveau project with documentation in the future, but in April 2015 the developers criticized - especially with regard to newer chipsets (GeForce 900) - for insufficient support and even a hindrance to their work Measures such as the introduction of signed firmware . Even the promise microcode - images to hand over to the Nouveau developers had so far failed to Nvidia. At the beginning of 2016, Nvidia gave in and handed over patches that implement basic functions for loading the signed firmware. Firmware itself has not yet been passed on.

At the X.org Developers Conference 2016 , developer Martin Peres once again criticized the lack of support from Nvidia and spoke of an acute threat to the nouveau project. With the increasing introduction of signed firmware, reverse engineering development is no longer possible and the necessary information is sometimes only transferred with a delay of up to two years, if at all. It was also stated that Nvidia itself benefited from nouveau, since the driver collection is now the basis for supporting the Tegra product line under Linux.

The two big competitors, on the other hand, support the development of free drivers by disclosing their specifications. Intel has always been and ATI / AMD since late 2008.

Development status

Since the beginning of 2013, nouveau has been able to address both 2D and 3D acceleration of all supported cards; since the Linux kernel version 3.8, the latter is usually activated by default. Deficits, however, still exist in the support of performance levels, which particularly affects the processors Tesla , Fermi and Kepler ( Geforce 600 ). The 3D acceleration is therefore currently less powerful than with the proprietary driver.

Current graphics cards are often limited in their performance due to a lack of information such as power management. Later, these are often available years after the series has been sold. Compared to the NVIDIA driver, over 90% of the power cannot be used with Maxwell 1 (750, 750 Ti) in Mesa 10.6.

An Nvidia GTX 680 (Kepler) is up to 10 times faster in Mesa 12.0 than newer cards of the actually faster Maxwell architecture.

OpenGL 4.3 is available for Kepler and Fermi in Mesa 13.0. OpenGL 4.4 and 4.5 are not yet certified, although all functions are available in Nouveau. Reclocking for better use of the performance levels (reclocking) is available with Linux 4.5 and higher up to Maxwell 1. Maxwell is only fully supported up to OpenGL 4.1.

In Mesa-dev 17.0 (Linux 4.10, test OpenGL 4.3, status 2016-12) some improvements (OpenGL 4.3 for Maxwell etc.) have been added. When comparing Kepler (here GeForce GTX 680, 760, 780 Ti) to Maxwell 2 (here GeForce GTX 980, 980 Ti), the missing information on Maxwell 2 for the full utilization of the hardware with the highest power consumption is very important. In the open source economy mode, there are worlds with a factor of 8 and more compared to the drivers from NVIDIA. The new Pascal series (GeForce 10) is still insufficiently supported here and was not tested here. At AMD, the performance of the open source drivers is already higher than that of the AMD closed source driver. This also shows the previous superiority of the OpenGL drivers from NVIDIA with significantly better utilization of the NVIDIA hardware.

The current status and plans for 2018 were presented at the FOSDEM conference. Work on Vulkan has started and some advances in Pascal and older series are in progress depending on information from Nvidia. OpenGL 4.4 and 4.5 for Fermi, Kepler, Maxwell and Pascal are about to be officially released after passing the last tests of the CTS test suite.

nouveau is now the default driver for most Linux distributions .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/nouveau/2013-September/014480.html
  2. ↑ Article "Linux kernel: Nvidia's new hardware makes open source development difficult" at golem.de
  3. ↑ Article "Nvidia: Nouveau developers prepare firmware integration" at golem.de
  4. ↑ Golem.de: "Nvidia's behavior endangers free Linux drivers"
  5. ↑ News article at heise.de
  6. ↑ nouveau article in the freedesktop.org wiki
  7. ↑ http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia-gtx750-nouveau&num=1
  8. ^ Nouveau Kepler vs. Maxwell Performance On Linux 4.6 + Mesa 11.3-dev
  9. ↑ https://people.freedesktop.org/~imirkin/glxinfo/
  10. ↑ http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=openclose-amdnv-2017&num=1
  11. ↑ https://fosdem.org/2018/schedule/event/nouveau/attachments/slides/2280/export/events/attachments/nouveau/slides/2280/nouveau.pdf