Linux 2.6.32.8 and Nouveau

[willimm]

The Fedora project has backported Nouveau to the 2.6.32.8 kernel, in a set of patches available on their CVS. And since Nouveau is free software drivers for Nvidia cards, I think it would be a good idea to backport these patches to 2.6.32.8.

So I've combined all of their Nouveau patches into one (it also adds a new Radeon driver), and it's attached to the ticket. Nouveau is listed as a staging driver, and it's stable enough for general 2D use, but 3D is in progress of making. This is just the first part of adding Nouveau and removing the partly obfuscated and non-3D supporting nv driver, since I'll make a ticket that applies for BLFS later for Nouveau.

The project's home page is here:

​http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/

Personally, I'd be extremely happy if Nouveau went into both books, as I'm a Nvidia user myself (I use a GeForce 7300 GS in my desktop, and a GeForce 9100M in my laptop). I'm hoping this goes into 6.6, but I wouldn't care if this was moved to 6.7 or 7.0. I'm going to make a ticket for BLFS for adding the Nouveau 2D/3D driver later.

[willimm]

The patch however is so big, that even xzing it won't work. Attaching as two parts.

[bdubbs@…]

Right idea, wrong list. This goes in BLFS.

[willimm]

This adds Nouveau to the kernel and fixes some DRM issues as well. This is Part 1 of the patch. But even when split, this patch is so big that I had to xz it. So XZ-utils is reqired to read the patch.

[willimm]

This adds Nouveau to the kernel and fixes some DRM issues as well. This is Part 2 of the patch. But even when split, this patch is so big that I had to xz it. So XZ-

[willimm]

Replying to bdubbs@…:

Right idea, wrong list. This goes in BLFS.

Yea, but you don't get the fact that Nouveau support is split in two parts: the first part is the kernel support, which goes into LFS and the second part is the Gallium/X.org support, which goes into BLFS. Thefore, this is the first part of the Nouveau support ticket and this is why it should be reopened.

[Matthew Burgess]

William,

Speaking mainly for myself, but I'm sure the following applies to the other editors too, but I don't believe that we have either the skills or the time required to handle supporting backported patches, especially anything as relatively new as the Nouveau driver.

In addition, I also don't want us to set a precedent here whereby other users believe that they can ask and expect to have their staging/unstable/out-of-tree patch of choice added and supported by the book.

If you want to use the Nouveau driver, then all credit to you for doing so and getting all the bits lined up so that they work together. As we like to say, "Your distro, your rules.". LFS will obviously gain Nouveau support when it gets added to mainline kernel releases, which will be when upstream believe it is stable enough to do so. This is like any other upstream package; we do not backport features from their development code bases, no matter how useful they may be; we simply do not have the capacity to support them.

Regards,

Matt.

[willimm]

Replying to matthew@…:

William,

Speaking mainly for myself, but I'm sure the following applies to the other editors too, but I don't believe that we have either the skills or the time required to handle supporting backported patches, especially anything as relatively new as the Nouveau driver.

Well, do you want to move it to 6.7? Just a thought.

In addition, I also don't want us to set a precedent here whereby other users believe that they can ask and expect to have their staging/unstable/out-of-tree patch of choice added and supported by the book.

Hey, Nouveau is pretty stable (at least the 2D part of it, they are still working heavally on the 3d support.)

If you want to use the Nouveau driver, then all credit to you for doing so and getting all the bits lined up so that they work together. As we like to say, "Your distro, your rules.". LFS will obviously gain Nouveau support when it gets added to mainline kernel releases, which will be when upstream believe it is stable enough to do so. This is like any other upstream package; we do not backport features from their development code bases, no matter how useful they may be; we simply do not have the capacity to support them.

This is like with XZ-utils, it's marked as a beta yet still very stable and usuable. But you can move it to 6.7 or even 7.0 if you want, I don't really care about what milestone it is.

William.

[Bryan Kadzban]

Replying to willimm:

Well, do you want to move it to 6.7? Just a thought.

No. (Or at least, speaking strictly for myself, not Matt, I'd rather not. Details below.)

Hey, Nouveau is pretty stable (at least the 2D part of it, they are still working heavally on the 3d support.)

So is grsecurity. Matt's point -- and I agree with it -- is, we can't afford to take every one of these kernel patchsets and include them in LFS. If a user might need to rebuild their kernel partway through BLFS because they forgot to turn something on (like NFS), or because they need to add patches (like nouveau), then those facts belong in the BLFS notes for those packages.

This is like with XZ-utils,

Which are also not in the book...

it's marked as a beta yet still very stable and usuable.

But the stability is not the point. See grsecurity, again.

But you can move it to 6.7 or even 7.0 if you want, I don't really care about what milestone it is.

The milestone is "whenever it gets included in the upstream kernel", as Bruce said in #2585.

Once the kernel developers think it's stable enough to put it into the official kernel, it will be available there (no patches necessary). And no further changes to LFS will be necessary at that point, either. So why make them now? (Especially if we have to host and update the patch itself when Fedora makes changes; that's insane given the manpower that we do have.)