what do you guys think about nouveau?

[startover]

with all the problems that F14 has with propriety nvidia drivers I am thinking about reinstalling F14 and stick to open source nouveau drivers.

But I do not want to go through all the process of a clean installation and reconfiguring my system and end up with the same situation as of now. So I am posting this thread to get some feed back from the people who actually stick to open source nouveau drivers (if there are any)

have you guys experienced any problems with nouveau such as overheating the laptop or poor performance?

[JohnJasonJordan]

I have never had problems with the nouveau driver, but I started with Fedora 11 and now have just Fedora 13, both x86_64.

I did recently have serious issues reinstalling it after trying the nVidia driver. You can find the sad saga here:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=254321

[vallimar]

My gripe with nouveau is I cannot use suspend or hibernate with it, that is a total dealbreaker for me nowadays.

[marko]

Originally Posted by vallimar

My gripe with nouveau is I cannot use suspend or hibernate with it, that is a total dealbreaker for me nowadays.

Well, suspend works for me with nouveau BUT the card fan goes full blast on wakeup. Since I don't want the noise and wear and tear, that's still a deal breaker. Currently I"m using nouveau, I just never use suspend mode.
But it could be they fixed it in an updated and I'd never know. Testing this is a pain since I had to reboot to kill the fan problem.
I don't just use nvidia because I've never been able to get nvidia closed driver to work on this machine since Fedora 12 (I do all the steps posted here in the guides: dracut, rdblacklist nouveau, etc etc, I always reboot to a black screen with nvidia)

UPDATE
OH yeah, the other thing I wished they'd fix (and this is already known by the devs)is the annoying flooding of the /var/log/messages and dmesg buffer with hundreds of lines of this stuff if you use multiple screens with nouveau:

[drm] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: unplugged DVI-I-2
[drm] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: plugged DVI-I-2
[drm] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: plugged DVI-I-2
[drm] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: unplugged DVI-I-2
[drm] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: unplugged DVI-I-2
[drm] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: plugged DVI-I-2
[drm] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: plugged DVI-I-2
[drm] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: unplugged DVI-I-2
[drm] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: unplugged DVI-I-2
[drm] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: plugged DVI-I-2
[drm] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: unplugged DVI-I-2

This makes any kind of debugging hard because useful messages are constantly pushed out.

[LittleOne]

This trouble reads like maybe it's a problem with not installing the needed libs and such when the drivers are installed... Is there a developer's tool software package that tests new driver installs as they install, and arbitrarily adds required bits and pieces as they're needed to make the new install functional all'round..?

[JohnJasonJordan]

Originally Posted by marko

I don't just use nvidia because I've never been able to get nvidia closed driver to work on this machine since Fedora 12 (I do all the steps posted here in the guides: dracut, rdblacklist nouveau, etc etc, I always reboot to a black screen with nvidia).

I have the rpmfusion repository enabled in my Fedora 13 x86_64 laptop. I used Yumex and nVidia driver is listed. It was even the latest version. All I had to do was select it and tell Yumex to install it. Yumex found the dependencies correctly and it installed without a problem.

Installing it from the rpmfusion repository does not enable it. You can just click on System > Administration > nVidia settings and it will pop up a message that it is not enabled and that you can enable it with "nvidia-config" as root from the command line. I did so and restarted X. Worked great.

One other thing that installing from the repository does not do is install nvidia-install. Therefore, if you want to uninstall it you can't use "nvidia-install --uninstall."

[vallimar]

Originally Posted by marko

Well, suspend works for me with nouveau BUT the card fan goes full blast on wakeup. Since I don't want the noise and wear and tear, that's still a deal breaker. Currently I"m using nouveau, I just never use suspend mode.
But it could be they fixed it in an updated and I'd never know. Testing this is a pain since I had to reboot to kill the fan problem.

I had that exact same problem with my 8800 GTS 512, super annoying, did it on hibernate recovery too if I recall. I had decided to swap back down to my older 7950 GT since I really don't need much in the way of graphics power. Now on hibernate/suspend, it goes down fine, but when it comes back.. I just have a screen full of technicolor garbage and a frozen system. Only recovery is a forced reboot. Not cool.

I don't just use nvidia because I've never been able to get nvidia closed driver to work on this machine since Fedora 12 (I do all the steps posted here in the guides: dracut, rdblacklist nouveau, etc etc, I always reboot to a black screen with nvidia)

For what it's worth, I've never had a problem with either of those cards using the nvidia driver. ABI breakages notwithstanding of course.

UPDATE
OH yeah, the other thing I wished they'd fix (and this is already known by the devs)is the annoying flooding of the /var/log/messages and dmesg buffer with hundreds of lines of this stuff if you use multiple screens with nouveau:


This makes any kind of debugging hard because useful messages are constantly pushed out.

Yeah, I always hated the nouveau spam, and the complete inability to turn it off or make it less verbose.

---------- Post added at 03:24 PM GMT ---------- Previous post was at 03:19 PM GMT ----------

Originally Posted by JohnJasonJordan

I have the rpmfusion repository enabled in my Fedora 13 x86_64 laptop. I used Yumex and nVidia driver is listed. It was even the latest version. All I had to do was select it and tell Yumex to install it. Yumex found the dependencies correctly and it installed without a problem.

Installing it from the rpmfusion repository does not enable it. You can just click on System > Administration > nVidia settings and it will pop up a message that it is not enabled and that you can enable it with "nvidia-config" as root from the command line. I did so and restarted X. Worked great.

One other thing that installing from the repository does not do is install nvidia-install. Therefore, if you want to uninstall it you can't use "nvidia-install --uninstall."

Some unlucky card+system combo's just seem to not work from what I've read.
Not having access to one, I can't begin to hazard a guess as to why.

Also, why on earth would you want to use the manual uninstall with the rpm?
That line of thinking is simply ludicrous for several reasons and you should quite rightly
be prevented from doing so.

---------- Post added at 03:38 PM GMT ---------- Previous post was at 03:24 PM GMT ----------

Originally Posted by startover

with all the problems that F14 has with propriety nvidia drivers I am thinking about reinstalling F14 and stick to open source nouveau drivers.

But I do not want to go through all the process of a clean installation and reconfiguring my system and end up with the same situation as of now. So I am posting this thread to get some feed back from the people who actually stick to open source nouveau drivers (if there are any)

have you guys experienced any problems with nouveau such as overheating the laptop or poor performance?

Just to point out a couple things, I am uncertain if compiz is now working with nouveau if you have the mesa experimental drivers since it has been awhile since I tried that. It definately will still not work with VDPAU, but that may not be important to you.

Also, you won't really gain anything re-installing from scratch. Just remove all the nvidia packages (yum remove "*nvidia*" -- or similar), make sure /etc/grub.conf edits are gone (no rdblacklist or nomodeset present), remove or rename the /etc/X11/xorg.conf so it won't try to load the nvidia driver. Make sure the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf was removed or renamed. The last step, before rebooting, is to rebuild the initrd image. You can use the dracut instructions, or I find it easy to just do something like "plymouth-set-default-theme -R charge". That command does the dracut stuff for you and makes sure the graphical plymouth theme gets reset. Currently the default is still "charge" but you can pick something else if you have others installed.

[JohnJasonJordan]

Originally Posted by vallimar

Also, why on earth would you want to use the manual uninstall with the rpm?
That line of thinking is simply ludicrous for several reasons and you should quite rightly
be prevented from doing so..

I went through several hours of head scratching trying to get nouveau working again after trying to remove the nVidia driver that I installed with Yumex.

1) Yumex installed a number of dependencies, but of course I did not write them down. Uninstalling via yum did not remove them.

2) Uninstalling via yum did not remove the nVidia X Server Settings entry under System > Administration.

3) Uninstalling via yum did not remove the blacklist-nouveau file that the installer created in /etc/modprobe.d/.

4) Uninstalling via yum did not remove or rename the xorg.conf file that the installer created. X won't start because the xorg.conf file created by the installer says to use the "nvidia" driver.

I had to do all of the above manually, and it took hours to figure it all out. My understanding is that nvidia-install --uninstall does take care of all of the above issues.

[startover]

guys forget about installing or removing nvidia or nouveau.
Let this thread get response to what it asks.
Have you experienced overheating or slowness or choppiness or any thing with nouveau so that you would rather install proprietary drivers?

[fcmugen]

Another thing that I noticed is power management especially on a laptop. with the nvidia proprietary drivers, it would run cooler and more longer battery life compared to the nouveau driver.

[greg.harvey]

I have been using Nouveau since I built this laptop on Fedora 12 (still, will update to 13 soon). I have literally only just gotten around to switching to the 'proper' nVidia driver for the Quadro FX 2700M in my computer. Comments:

- Nouveau much easier to install
- Nouveau just works
- Nouveau much easier to configure (integrates with standard GNOME UI, so intuitive)

BUT
- Nouveau performance is poor (at least with this version: xorg-x11-drv-nouveau.i686, 0.0.15)
- Full screen Flash (e.g. YouTube) is unplayable without the nVidia drivers
- nVidia settings are far more comprehensive (though less intuitive to use)
- I find Nouveau sometimes causes the mouse pointer to disappear from my second screen and the only way to get it back is reboot, which is really annoying
- I, too, have suspend problems - I didn't put it down to Nouveau, but seems it may have been

If the performance issues were fixed, I'd probably just use Nouveau and put up with the rest, but not being able to play FLV files full screen in a browser - well, it sounds silly but it's such a basic thing to want to be able to do and Nouveau can't do it.

[ryptyde]

I have two F13x86_64 desktop installs both have GeForce 9500GT cards and using the "mesa-dri-drivers-experimental". Desktop effects are working. No lock-ups, full screen flash video. No choppiness or overheating but I don't have a laptop with a nvidia card. Just ran glxgears and get a 1150+ FPS reading in the terminal.

phil

ps: also have a F14 32bit install with a GeForce 6200 card working with the "mesa-dri-drivers-experimental".

[droidhacker]

Originally Posted by startover

with all the problems that F14 has with propriety nvidia drivers I am thinking about reinstalling F14 and stick to open source nouveau drivers.

But I do not want to go through all the process of a clean installation and reconfiguring my system and end up with the same situation as of now. So I am posting this thread to get some feed back from the people who actually stick to open source nouveau drivers (if there are any)

have you guys experienced any problems with nouveau such as overheating the laptop or poor performance?

nouveau is better than their blob, but still leaves a lot to be desired. In the future, just say no to nvidia.