Guest post by 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.
Fedora is also a distribution which choose to install KDE4.0 by default for KDE..
It’s clearly a (very) bleeding edge distribution so the use of Nouveau as a default driver cannot really be used as an indicator of the state of the Nouveau’s driver..
The goal of Fedora doing this is move the free software projects forward. When Fedora 9 included KDE 4, the feedback helped KDE 4 improve to where it has gotten today. Fedora KDE community explained that in
http://magazine.redhat.com/2008/02/18/kde-sig-talks-about-kde-4/
and
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs/KDE/KDE4FAQ
It benefits the entire ecosystem to do that. Nouveau is similar. Red Hat and Fedora has the engineering expertise to do this since they are among the largest kernel and Xorg contributors. There is no claim that it is ready for absolutely everybody. If you read the feature page, you will see that the status is already better than nv driver in many cases and Fedora including it now means whatever distribution you are using will benefit sooner or latter.
That’s not what they and others have been saying previously over the issue, and they’ve even validated the approach KDE’s developers took with KDE 4.0 by saying that and doing what they did with other packages. Previously the position was that KDE 4.0 wasn’t ready but they were promised that it would be OK so they included it anyway.
Very good point.
And for a second there, I was getting kind of excited…
Well, it must be at least somewhat usable if they are including. I mean this is much more important than kde, because without this you wouldn’t even able to run kde in the first place.
I agree with the contention that Fedora’s motives in choosing Nouveau over nv in the upcoming Fedora release is to further spotlight the project and ultimately bring improvements to it. In the Linux ecosystem we have leaders and we have followers. We have givers and takers. Leaders aren’t afraid to take the unbeaten path whereas followers will only go where others have gone before them. It takes guts to be the first but ultimately we’ll all benefit. Fedora has always been a cutting edge, highly innovative distribution. It’s sort of the Sidux of RPM distributions. I’m always interested in what those guys are doing over there!
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.
Ok, that explains a lot. I have also noticed that the nv drivers never supported my new graphic cards, so hopefully this will fill the gaps.
Note that what they’re replacing is simply the old 2d-only driver, so all this really indicates is that Nouveau has reached a sufficient point in terms of features and stability to be considered a replacement for that. It doesn’t say anything about the current status of 3D support, beyond that it doesn’t get in the way of being a decent 2D driver.