[PREVIEW] Nouveau on FreeBSD (Take 2)

[Adam McDougall]

Is there any chance of getting nouveau to work on a PCI 
NV34 GeForce FX 5200? (not pci-e)  I actually don't really care 
about 3d unless I can use it to improve normal "2d" activity,
I'm just looking for an improved response above what the 
nv driver gives me with XAA.  Its a little sluggish but 
sufficient for day to day activities. 

When I try Option      "AccelMethod" "EXA" it runs with XAA
anyway: (WW) NV(0): Option "AccelMethod" is not used.

When I try nouveau, it tells me:
(EE) [drm] drmOpen failed.
(EE) NOUVEAU(0): [drm] error opening the drm

I don't even know what drm I could try loading or if it 
would help.

vgapci0 at pci0:2:1:0:     class=0x030000 card=0x00000000 chip=0x032210de rev=0xa1 hdr=0x00
    vendor     = 'Nvidia Corp'
    device     = 'GeForce FX 5200 [NV34.3]'
    class      = display
    subclass   = VGA

Thanks for any advice, let me know if I can provide more information.


On Sat, Mar 21, 2009 at 07:04:23PM -0500, Robert Noland wrote:

  Ok, this patch should work on NV50 chips also.
  
  What you get is EXA and Xv.
  
  You still need:
  
  A recent -CURRENT or -STABLE.
  
  git master of libdrm and xf86-video-nouveau.
  
  This patch.
  
  Things I've figured out since the last patch...
  
  On NV50 class hardware you need to have a compositing manager running
  for Xv to work.  That means xcompmgr, metacity with composite enabled,
  xfce (rumored to work as well, haven't tried).  If your running Gnome
  with metacity, open gconf-editor and go to apps->metacity->general and
  check the composite box.
  
  On NV40 class hardware, you don't need the composite manager.  In fact
  (at least with Xserver 1.6 which I'm running now), if a composite
  manager is enabled, I'm seeing high cpu utilization from Xorg under some
  circumstances.  I don't think this is a drm issue, but still an issue.
  For me, if I start a video using mplayer in an xterm, cpu is fine as
  long as that xterm is the foreground window.  If it is not the
  foreground window, even if it isn't obscured I see the cpu utilization.
  Disabling the composite manager makes everything fine.
  
  http://people.freebsd.org/~rnoland/drm-nouveau-032109.patch
  
  robert.
  
  -- 
  Robert Noland <rnoland at FreeBSD.org>
  FreeBSD