After several months working on testing and integration, last night we officially transitioned from -nv to -nouveau. If you own nvidia hardware and are not using the proprietary drivers, you will be affected by this change.
The principle reason we made this move is because -nouveau is more actively developed upstream than -nv, and is as good or better than -nv functionally. Based on testing feedback[1], we recognize there may be regressions on certain hardware that used to work on -nv, but we are confident that overall this will give the average user better results than the status quo, and will only get better going forward. Another key reason for making this change now, is to gain Kernel Mode-setting (automatic screen resolution selection) support on this hardware. By doing mode-setting in the kernel, it promises a smoother and more graphically attractive boot process. To achieve this, we are using nouveau code backported from the 2.6.33 kernel via the linux-backports-modules package, as the 2.6.32 did not have usable nouveau KMS code. We are still evaluating and experimenting with how best to integrate and support this code, so may make some further adjustments in coming weeks. Since this version of -nouveau supports only 2D, it's our expectation that most users will use this driver during installation, and then switch over to -nvidia. To facilitate this, a major goal for us in Lucid is to restructure and improve the process for smoothly transitioning to -nvidia (and back). To this end, we've established a testing community to run through this process each week[2] so we have a reliable measurement of our progress. Looking further forward, 3D functionality is under work upstream. We've not tested it yet, but expect that it will take some time to be stable enough for real world use so are not considering it for Lucid. But we will be providing it via our xorg-edgers PPA[3] at some point, and hope to include it in a future Ubuntu release. Bryce 1: Results of -nouveau testing: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Testing/NouveauEvaluation 2: Results of -nvidia testing: http://qa.ubuntu.com/reports/xorg_prop_drivers/ 3: If you don't know what xorg-edgers is, you probably shouldn't be installing it! :-) -- Ubuntu-x mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-x
