Hi all, After a little bit of teething trouble, it seems that the -nv -> -nouveau default driver switch has gone relatively nicely.
There are a couple of things that I know remain to be done: 1) Decide if xserver-xorg-video-nouveau is where we want the hook to make initramfs-tools copy lbm_nouveau into the initramfs. 2) Work out how to handle upgrades from Karmic for those intrepid users who already have nouveau-kernel-source installed. 3) Work out how to handle nouveau-firmware 1 - To give nouveau users the same KMS boot experience as other gpus, and to help prevent vga16fb claiming fb0 and causing everything to fail, we want to copy lbm_nouveau to the initrd, along with the other gpu drivers. Currently this hook in in the xserver-xorg-video-novueau package. Ideally it would be in the package that ships lbm_nouveau.ko, namely l-b-m-nouveau-2.6.32-ABI, but that obviously breaks the ability to parallel install the packages for different ABIs, so that's no good. The other place it could go is in the linux-backports-modules-nouveau metapackages, but again that breaks for the (less common) multiple installed kernel flavours case. So, it's either adding lbm_nouveau to the existing framebuffer hook in initramfs-tools, or in xserver-xorg-video-nouveau. 2 - For users who have nouveau installed on Karmic, they'll have the dkms-ified nouveau-kernel-source package installed. This will fail to build against 2.6.32 and lbm-nouveau obsoletes it, so we'll want to remove it on upgrade. A replaces/conflicts pair should be enough to do this, but will need testing. I don't think we'll want to keep the nouveau-kernel-source package around in any PPA; we can keep the nouveau kernel module up to date with lbm-nouveau in xorg-edgers, and users who build their own kernels should be able to just enable nouveau from staging - at least until we update to the 0.0.16 nouveau kernel interface. 3 - For GeForce 8 and later hardware, nouveau requires the ctxprog/ctxval firmware-like voodoo to provide any acceleration. This hardware also requires a swizzled framebuffer and doesn't provide a non-swizzled view to the CPU, which means that CPU fallbacks are slow. Currently, the nouveau-firmware package is in multiverse and so can't be pulled in to the default install. Bryce was going to talk to some of his nvidia contacts - did anything come of that? If we can't get nouveau-firmware in the default install, we should probably get Jockey to suggest it post-install instead. Finally, I'm still seeing some reports on IRC of nouveau turning off the monitor on boot, leaving the system unusable. I've done some investigation, and I've got a hypothesis: if vga16fb gets loaded first, it claims fb0 and everything dies a fiery death. From my slight understanding of modules.order, the in-kernel gpu drivers won't suffer from this because they're listed before vga16fb. Testing this by editing modules.order to place i915 after vga16fb results in my intel laptop displaying similar symptoms. I'm not familiar with how the kernel uses modules.order, though, so this could be wrong. It suggests that we may have the same sort of problems should we pull 2.6.34 drm into lbm for intel & radeon, though.
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