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FAQ - Frequently asked questions

[WORK in PROGRESS]

1. Domande generali

1.1. Vorrei donare al progetto...

You can help us by donating your time. Documentation, webpage, RE or coding: all offer vacancies. We currently don't accept money and we currently don't intend to change that.

1.2. cosa sapete dell'impegno http://www.pledgebank.com/nouveaudriver?

The pledge was setup without us knowing and was in no way initiated by us. When we heard about it, we honestly didn't expect it to succeed. Well seems we were wrong. Currently (10.01.2007) the initiator of the pledge is working out the payment details and will let us know how to proceed. Please have a look at the pledge page and / or his personal blog for newest information about that.

1.3. Cosa farete con questo denaro?

To be honest: We are still discussing the details. Probably we will either buy some development time (pay someone for X months to work exclusively on our project) or we will buy NVidia hardware for the developers. When we get the money we will put up a link to a page where we will detail what we are using the money for. And no: Beer, although tempting is not on our list of possibilities (But if you are at LCA next week, Darktama and Airlied are giving a talk, I'm sure they won't reject a free beer...)

1.4. Per quando ci si potrà aspettare un driver funzionante?

For 2D there are still some known bugs but nouveau should work the same as the nv Xorg driver. For basic 3D we are aiming for late autumn. It really is not easy to predict, as showstoppers may appear anytime.

1.5. Qual'è lo stato attuale del driver?

Developer's point of view: 2D works as well as nv driver from Xorg with a few additional features. Some 3D acceleration is implemented, mostly on NV40+ cards. You can find more details in our TiNDCs (The irregular Nouveau Development Companion) which are listed on the IrcChatLogs page.
End user's point of view: nothing works, nothing is supported.

1.6. Voglio aiutarvi! Che posso fare?

Probably the easiest thing is to run REnouveau and send us the output. If you want to get your hands dirty, take a look at our ToDo page. The tasks marked as "junior" should be easier for people unfamiliar with our project.

1.7. Cosa devo fare per far andare REnouveau e mandarvi i risultati?

The instructions to get renouveau are in the page REnouveau. For guidelines on packaging the results please read REnouveauDumps. Please check the list of current dumps at http://users.tkk.fi/~jpakkane/ren/ first.

1.8. NVidia vi da qualche supporto?

No we don't get any support from NVidia, neither specs nor docs nor sources. We started our code from the nv Xorg driver. That driver was mainly written by NVidia and is still "somewhat" supported. See "How did you find out how NVidia cards work then?"

1.9. Perchè fate questo?

We can't give you the answer, as each of the project members has his own motivation. Just a few answers from our staff, we got when this question was raised:

• Don't like binary blobs
• Want to give back to the OSS community
• Want to learn driver programming
• Yes, we can develop our own drivers regardless of what people at NVidia may think
• Support for missing features
• Support for operating systems not supported by NVidia (any PowerPC based OS for example)
• Just for the fun of it
• Binary driver keeps crashing even in 2D
• Slow Xorg "nv" driver (slow in performance and slow to get new card support (Nvidia 8800 is currently not supported))

So pick the reasons you feel are important, chances are that quite a few project members will agree with you pick

2. Domande tecniche

2.1. Come fate a capire come funzionano le schede Nvidia?

Basically, we store the state of the card before and after running a simplistic OpenGL program. After that we diff the states in order to find out, what was sent to the card. See our REnouveau documentation for further information.

2.2. supportate il dual head / dual link?

Initial dual head work is done by Airlied and can be found in the RandR1.2 branch of nouveau. Tester are welcome to see what works and what doesn't.

2.3. Quali schede tentate di supportare?

Everything starting from NV04. Older cards may see some support when everything is working and the developers have time to do this.

2.4. Di quale versione di Xorg ho bisogno?

You will need at least Xorg 7.1. If you want to test RandR 1.2 you will need the most current Xorg development version to run it.

2.5. Quali sistemi/architetture contate di supportare?

The developers are currently working on Linux and *BSD. Linux runs on AMD64, x86 (UP and SMP) and PowerPC.

2.6. l'ibernazione è supportata?

Not yet.

2.7. Supporterete PS3 GNU/Linux?

Even though the PS3 has an nvidia graphics chip of the G70 family, there is no chance of support at the moment because sony prevents us from accessing the chip directly.

2.8. Supporterete l' Xv?

Currently, nouveau uses the "nv" code to support Xv. It is quite limited, and ArthurHuillet is working on improving the Xv implementation in nouveau.

2.9. Supporterete l' XvMC (hardware accelerated video decoding)?

XvMC (X-Video Motion Compensation) will be supported someday.

3. Suggerimenti

3.1. Nouveau non funziona!

You must use Xorg version 7.1 or later. You must disable the kernel framebuffer driver for virtual console, it will make a mess. You might need to recompile xorg-server against the DRM git tree. This is for 2D support. For 3D, if you install the DRI module by installing Mesa from git and it breaks, you get to keep the pieces. At least for the time being.

3.2. non posso inserire drm.ko, "duplicated symbol"

Make sure that you have not set CONFIG_DRM in your kernel config.

3.3. Il caricamento di nouveau.ko fallisce con invalid module format

drm.ko needs to be inserted first.

3.4. la compilazione di xf86-video-nouveau fallisce: Non viene trovato nouveau_drm.h.

Make sure that nouveau_drm.h lies in a path, which can be found by your compiler. Best thing in the same directory as the headers of the other X11 drivers. Or add your include path to the makefile.

3.5. Undefined symbol "GlxSetVisualConfigs"

X: symbol lookup error: nouveau_drv.so: undefined symbol: GlxSetVisualConfigs
You may need to Load "glx", or you may still have the nvidia GLX driver installed, and need to use the xorg one instead. Often the nvidia module will be /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libglx.so, with the original xorg glx in /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx.so, in which case you can just move the nvidia .so out of the way.

3.6. Syntax error near unexpected token RANDR

syntax error near unexpected token RANDR when running ./configure on xf86-video-nouveau means that you are probably missing X development libraries. (On Ubuntu, try apt-get install xorg-dev; on Fedora, yum install xorg-x11-server-sdk)

3.7. I fonts spariscono

This is a known problem with Xorg 7.2. Try Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy" in xorg.conf as a workaround.

3.8. Io ricevo *ERROR* Unknow ctx_voodoo per la mia scheda ...

NVidia cards need an init value which seems to be different from card to card. We need a mmio-trace to find out this value. Please do a MmioTrace and report back.

3.9. renouveau non compila: impossibile trovare -lXvMCNVIDIA

This is usually due to the missing symbolic link /usr/lib/libXvMCNVIDIA.so. You can create it with something like

ln -s /usr/lib/libXvMCNVIDIA.so.1.0.8776 /usr/lib/libXvMCNVIDIA.so

as root. Substitute the name libXvMCNVIDIA.so.1.0.8776 with the version you have.

3.10. renouveau dice "device detection failed"

Usually this is due to broken nvidia driver installation. glxinfo should report

direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
...
client glx vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
...
OpenGL vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation

• If it does not, try to reinstall the proprietary driver from nvidia.

3.11. renouveau segfaults

Let me guess, you have a PCI-E card and nVidia driver version 9xxx. If you do, then it is a known "feature". The driver maps memory areas in and out and renouveau loses the track. You can try to downgrade to driver version 8xxx. If you do not have PCI-E and 9xxx, let us know.

It would be useful to Renouveau developers if you could run renouveau under gdb. Instead of running renouveau, use the command gdb ./renouveau and you should get the gdb prompt. Command run and it should start renouveau and crash at some point, then you should be facing the gdb prompt again. Use the command bt and save the output. You can use e.g. http://rafb.net/paste/ and post a link to #nouveau IRC channel. Finally, you can kill renouveau with command kill and exit gdb with quit.

3.12. renouveau: la creazione della probe window fallisce.

You are likely using a 16-bit color depth on your desktop. Please, try again with 24-bit colors. Renouveau uses the stencil buffer, which seems to be connected to color depth.

4. Domande legali

4.1. Violate la NVidias EULA con REnouveau ?

No. We don't touch NVidia's binary blob at all, we just observe what the driver changes in memory. All config data we have, is exposed in some /proc or /dev files. And running OpenGL is the main reason why you would use the driver. That is no violation.

4.2. Che licenza usate per nouveau?

Nouveau is made of 3 components : DDX (2D driver), DRI (3D driver) and DRM (kernel component). The DDX and DRI use the MIT license, the DRM uses a dual MIT/GPL license. REnouveau is under GPL.

nouveau: FAQ-it (last edited 2008-05-17 04:07:26 by localhost)

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