Nouveau Driver Comes to Kernel 2.6.33
Good news for anyone with a NVIDIA graphics card: the Nouveau driver goes into Kernel 2.6.33 and supports DRM.
Nouveau is the free driver mainly developed by Red Hat with 2D and partial 3D support for the NVIDIA graphics cards. The nv driver currently used for 2D support is fairly old and leaves most NVIDIA cards well below their full capabilities.
Nouveau developers have now appealed to have the code of about 36,000 lines taken up in Kernel version 2.6.33, which was not previously possible in that the driver was still comprised of proprietary code, albeit a very small part. The team around David Airlie and Ben Skeggs has since outsourced this part (the ctx_voodoo microcode) in firmware that can be subsequently loaded on the current GeForce 6 cards.
The driver will first land in the staging tree, which Greg Kroah-Hartman maintains, as the drm-nouveau-pony branch. It will then flow about one or two versions later into the main branch. With the inclusion into the kernel and DRM support, most distros will shortly switch to the Nouveau driver as the standard for NVIDIA cards. Up to now only Fedora had adopted the driver that had been long classified as experimental.
Source: phoronix.com.
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Working Exploit for a Linux Kernel Flaw Made Public
Even before a bug received its CVE identifier or an upstream fix, the local privilege escalation vulnerability exploit found its way into the wild.
-
r/opensource Bans AI-Assisted and AI-Related Projects
The de facto subreddit for all things open source has not only banned AI-related projects but also users who "don't speak English."
-
Bottlenecks Discovered by Meta Engineers Lead to Scalability Improvements
Thanks to a small group of engineers at Meta, the Linux kernel module kernfs has been improved, which has led to some serious gains.
-
PwnEscape Poses VM Vulnerability
A guest-to-host escape flaw in Linux KVM, named PwnEscape, might be yet another means of attacking Linux.
-
Linux Mint 27 Set for a Christmas Release
The developers behind Linux Mint have announced a Christmas release, and it looks like Santa's sack will be brimming with features.
-
Is Linus Torvalds Vibe Coding?
The creator of Linux has added AI into his process for Linux kernel development, and it's more than just for debugging.
-
openKylin 3.0 Released with Expanded AI Integration
The latest release features a pre-installed AI agent to help perform tasks.
-
DigitalOcean Ends Open Source Credits Program
In a change that has surprised many open source developers, DigitalOcean has decided to sunset its Open Source Credits Program.
-
Office 365 Available for Testing on Linux via Bottles
Linux users can now test the official Office 365, thanks to Mirko Brombin's work on Bottles.
-
Dutch Government Turns to Open Source for Digital Sovereignty
Following in the footsteps of other European countries, the Netherlands is looking to increase its sovereign digital infrastructure with open source software.