Hello! I was wondering whether any of you guys are planning to port the kernelspace part of the nouveau driver to FreeBSD. This is really not a lot of code, and if this was ported to FreeBSD, the whole *BSD and Nouveau community would benefit from it. I believe, that this is not an impossible or extremely hard job, please note that my kernel knowledge is vastly limited though. However, since official x64 drivers by nVidia aren't likely to be released anytime soon, this would be a great thing to have on FreeBSD, because the 'nv' driver in Xorg is a pain to use.
There are a few buts here. None of the active Nouveau developers are working on any BSD. There are few people, who are porting DRM in general and some drivers to various BSDs, but it is not a small task. The Nouveau linux-specific part of the code might be small, but the general linux-specific DRM infrastructure is not. And things will get worse with e.g. kernel mode setting. The whole graphics stack revolution is primarily on Linux, and the very few BSD devels are trying their best to keep up. If you want it to happen sooner than later (if ever), lend a hand, and come to #nouveau and #dri-devel irc channels. The BSD devels there could tell you what is needed.
(In reply to comment #1) > There are a few buts here. None of the active Nouveau developers are working on > any BSD. There are few people, who are porting DRM in general and some drivers > to various BSDs, but it is not a small task. The Nouveau linux-specific part of > the code might be small, but the general linux-specific DRM infrastructure is > not. And things will get worse with e.g. kernel mode setting. The whole > graphics stack revolution is primarily on Linux, and the very few BSD devels > are trying their best to keep up. > > If you want it to happen sooner than later (if ever), lend a hand, and come to > #nouveau and #dri-devel irc channels. The BSD devels there could tell you what > is needed. > Ok, please excuse my lacking knowledge. How is 'radeonhd' able to run on so many platforms and why doesn't nouveau? They apparently don't rely on kernel/os specific code, but how can they achieve the same goal then?
radeonhd was a driver born out of some corporate agreement, and there probably was a requirement was that it ran without a kernel module (this all imo). nouveau was born for very different reasons, and doing a full driver does require a kernel module. So to avoid all sorts of nasty special code paths (which are bothersome to maintain and potentially buggy) the project leader decided to require a kernel module. This has been the case from day 1 as far as i know.
It appears that this bug report has laid dormant for quite a while. Sorry we haven't gotten to it. Since we fix bugs all the time, chances are pretty good that your issue has been fixed with the latest software. Please give it a shot. (Linux kernel 3.10.7, xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.9, mesa 9.1.6, or their git versions.) If upgrading to the latest isn't an option for you, your distro's bugzilla is probably the right destination for your bug report. In an effort to clean up our bug list, we're pre-emptively closing all bugs that haven't seen updates since 2011. If the original issue remains, please make sure to provide fresh info, see http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/Bugs/ for what we need to see, and re-open this one. Thanks, The Nouveau Team
Use of freedesktop.org services, including Bugzilla, is subject to our Code of Conduct. How we collect and use information is described in our Privacy Policy.