Can FreeBSD have Nouveau driver port?

[kpedersen]

I'm not aware of the performance of amdgpu driver. Last time I dabbled with ATi it was 10 years ago and the situation wasn't good. There was closed source and open source driver and both had issues. Also, what is the status of long term support, as ATi is notorious for obsolesence of adapters in new driver versions - there's currently 10-15 years of backward support in nvidia-driver(s), you can run the model from yesterday or from 2007.

Things have changed considerably. I also had terrible experiences with ATi of old; especially the fglrx (Catalyst) driver. I spent hours trying to get that cruft working on Fedora Core 4. These days AMDGPU is probably the best (I never tried the "value added" proprietary version because I don't need audio via hdmi). Likewise with Nouveau I was also pleasantly surprised. It did the job on an older Nvidia GT9xxx card.

The issue with the nvidia blob is mainly that it stops working with newer Xorgs after a while. I experienced something similar to this: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2016-March/270988.html

 

[larshenrikoern]

Hi

I am a quite new user of FreeBSD. I use it as workstation and as a desktop. And in 2012-2021 I have been using linux with nouveau without issues. It did even work with gaming. And if FreeBSD is porting intel/amd graphics drivers form linux, why not nouveau. But I fully understand the argument about time. But if Nvidia pulls the chord it will hopefully be done.

 

[huskers]

I've used the x11/nvidia-driver driver for the past 20 or so years, I don't see this happening any time soon.

Sorry to state existing drivers for some of decade plus old nvidia chipsets do not work with new version of Xorg. Especially chipsets supported by 304 driver.

On linux nouveau still supports and works on these chipsets, may not support games but definitely can still be used for performing other non-gpu intensive activity.

So your statement it has been working for 20 years only applies to chipsets supported by NVIDIA.

 

[kpedersen]

On linux nouveau still supports and works on these chipsets, may not support games but definitely can still be used for performing other non-gpu intensive activity.

I am also keen to get Nouveau for all my old grubby hardware but it is unlikely for now.

A long while back FreeBSD did have an initial support of Nouveau in the kernel (you can still find the userland X11 components in ports here)

Unfortunately it became unmaintained and ultimately removed. However this did demonstrate that for now, whilst NVidia are providing adequate support for their drivers, many users tend to prefer that. Yes, for us users of older cards, this is unfortunately not always a solution.

Personally I am cautiously optimistic that Nvidia will open-source the remaining parts of their driver and we can migrate to that in the next 10-20 years.

 

[Cath O'Deray]

… I saw that NetBSD has a port of Linux's Nouveau. Sooner or later I'll give it a try, but I don't want to abandon FreeBSD. Any chance to see Nouveau on FreeBSD? …

x11-drivers/xf86-video-nouveau is dead.

Nouveau featured in a Foundation call for ideas, please see comment 24.

From <https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/FAQ.html#whichsystemsdoyousupport>:

… There used to be some FreeBSD support in UMS days (see Nouveau Companion 43), but Nouveau is KMS-only now.