nouveau (graphics)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
nouveau is an X.Org Foundation and Freedesktop.org project which was initially based on the obfuscated 2D-only free and open source "nv" driver, aiming to develop free software drivers for NVIDIA graphics cards, by reverse engineering NVIDIA's current proprietary drivers for Linux.
Like most other 3D graphics drivers for X.Org, nouveau is implemented as a module and is licensed under the MIT license. It originally used the Direct Rendering Infrastructure of Mesa 3D for rendering 3D computer graphics which allows to accelerate 3D drawing using the graphics processing unit, directly from the 3D application, but in February 2008 the work on DRI support ceased and moved on to the new Gallium3D.[1][2]
Contents |
[edit] Tools
The project uses several custom made programs for its reverse engineering, such as mmio-trace and renouveau.
[edit] Renouveau
Renouveau stands for most of the reverse engineering work. Users with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers can help the development of nouveau by providing information about the hardware of their NVIDIA cards. This is done running renouveau on their computers. Renouveau works by copying the current graphics card MMIO register space, drawing some graphics and taking another copy of the MMIO, and outputting the difference to a text file. It runs slightly over 70 different tests which the user of the computer then makes a tar.bz2 archive of and submits it by e-mail, after which it is automatically transferred to the project's FTP servers for the developers to analyze.
Renouveau is licensed under the GPL and is built on SDL's rendering technology.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
[edit] References
- ^ The state of Nouveau, part 2. LWN.net (2008-02-26). Retrieved on 2008-03-07.
- ^ Nouveau Companion 36. Retrieved on 2008-03-07.
|
|||||
