On Mon, Nov 09, 2009 at 10:39:23PM -0600, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 09:55:03 +0530, Rahul Sundaram sundaram@fedoraproject.org wrote:
Hopefully Nouveau gets 3D support within a couple of releases as well. Getting rid of the biggest pain of proprietary drivers would be one giant step forward for Linux on the desktop.
Yeah. While I wouldn't go out and buy nvidia cards I have a couple in systems I got as scrap and it would be nice to have 3d on them. I don't trust the nvidia stuff not to screw things up for helping test the nouveau drivers, so I have been stuck with only 2d support for a good chunk of F12's development.
The nouveau guys have made a surprising amount of progress and I think there is a good chance they will have good 3d support 2 or 3 releases down the road. (Though I would like to see Red Hat help out more to cut this to 1 or 2 releases, since I think the current situation hurts Fedora.) I'd also like to see people move away from Cg and use the free and more portable equivalents.
I had the good fortune to meet Ben Skeggs, a nouveau developer at Red Hat's Brisbane office, and tell him how effective some of his work has been so far. (I have a laptop with NVidia, not by choice but through a weird set of circumstances you can find on my blog from last year.)
I have full KMS now on this laptop, and while there's no 3D yet, I still managed to surprise a bunch of people here in Brisbane by plugging my laptop into an external LCD TV, and having it just work. I used this as a great example of how 6 months in Fedora-land can bring a lot of changes.
By the way, I also met Dave Airlie and told him my r770-based ATI card was also rocking, with the added bonus of 3D support. I'm really happy with the progress in F12 and I hope other people enjoy it too!