Nouveau Progress

I compiled the new mesa today, so I could try out the latest nouveau 3D stuff:

So close….. yet so far.

Some stuff rocks hard with the new stuff, in particular supertux runs really well now :-)

Also, thanks to Stuart Bennett, My LCD panel now uses the same dithering as the binary blob. This means it looks as good with the free driver as with the blob. We're still thinking about how we can work out what bit corresponds to FPDither.

If you are coming to FOSDEM, make sure you add Stephane Marchesin and the other guys in #nouveau to your drinks list. :-)

Dear NVIDIA and LENOVO

Dear NVIDIA and LENOVO,

Please can you tell me what bit in your NV4x BIOS corresponds to if_is_18bit, i.e. if my LVDS panel supports 24 bit colour or not.
I do understand telling the nouveau developers such business-critical pieces of information could impact future profits, and I do understand that documenting magic numbers means that the numbers could be seen by both ATI and Intel robbing you of trade secrets and your interlectual property. Not.

Thanks.

In other news, Richard was annoyed by having to manually add Option “FPDither” in xorg.conf to stop his Lenovo LVDS display looking rubbish.

p.s. Does anyone happen to have a biosmod scp file for a NVIDIA nv40 bios? Beers a-plenty if you share.

Nouveau performance improvements

I blogged a few months ago about performance improvements in nouveau, the free 3D driver for NVIDIA cards. This morning I tested with nouveau ddx from git, drm master from git and kernel 2.6.24-rc6 and used the gtkperf benchmark.

Nouveau 2007-07-13: 25.24s
Nouveau 2007-12-30: 17.88s

Quite an incredible increase in speed.

On another note, I've been able to resize my screen for the first time using the normal driver, although using experimental Randr12 mode I get this:

Fun times with nouveau… 

HIG and gnome-packagekit

Any HIG dudes got a few minutes? The gnome-packagekit project has quite a few glade files that were quickly designed, and hence the GNOME HIG wasn't a primary concern. Now the applications are being used by more and more people I think it's important that we properly conform to the HIG.

If anyone wants to help out, please join the mailing list and send us a quick email. There's also a lot of other easy stuff to do in the TODO file if you have a spare few minutes. Thanks!

Richard.
 

Hazel Blears scares me

I normally don't get political on this blog but it has all got too much. Hazel Blears is Member of Parliament (Labour) for Salford in the UK. She's also Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government.


photo from telegraph.co.uk

She's one of those people that listening to is like running your nails down a chalky blackboard. She's in a powerful position and comes up with some very crazy ideas. She really scares me.

Now I feel much better.

FOSDEM and PackageKit

In February I will be at FOSDEM, giving a presentation about PackageKit. It would be good if as many of you guys and girls interested in PackageKit could be there. The presentation will last about an hour, and probably spill out into a bar afterwards. The abstract is as follows: The presentation will give a complete overview to PackageKit along with background material. It will first highlight the issues that need solving, and expose the problems we have in the current suite of tools. It will examine other update solutions such as Microsoft Windows Vista ™, Apple Mac OS X ™ and also what has been done with some Linux distributions. The main section of the talk will introduce PackageKit, expose the internal design and explain any important ideas and design choices. Finally, ways to use PackageKit are discussed, along with screenshots of all the latest GUI tools. Time will remain for questions and discussion about PackageKit at the end.