Someone have any guide to use Nouveau Video Driver on FreeBSD 10?

manufacturers expose the modern resolutions in vbe if someone bothers to do a 3.0 complaint init (in theory, but it never worked for me for some reason because i always ended up with vbe2), so it should not be problematic to set the screen to 1360x768, 1920x1080 or 1024x600 or whatever strange resolution a laptop/monitor has.
 
I wiil just add that the nouveau driver is working quite well on linux (Debian, devuan and gentoo). The main problem is that Nvidia will only load their own signed firmware to the card. For freebsd porting it from the linux kernel part dri is required (just as hass been done for amd and intel cards). The driver works quite well without the firmware on linux. I prefer open source drivers over commercial ones, so they are integrated into the system. That is the only reason atm. for me not using freebsd as my main system. Just played with it from time to time.
 
larshenrikoern said:
I wiil just add that the nouveau driver is working quite well on linux
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Oh yeah??? What does work well? I wanted to give it a shot with Xubuntu, the goal was to see how good 2D-acceleration was with kodi (we are talking about the nvidia geforce 6100 onboard chip), and the system froze twice, first time already in the menu, second time after cold reboot. I could at least pick a stream, but the video was quite laggy and unsmooth and finally the system froze again.

My conclusion thus: nouveau is useless and not worth porting it! If not even kodi works, what is it good for, then?

In the past with an old laptop with a Geforce 7300 Go (I don't think that there is much difference, as that chip does not have hardware video decoding either) I had a PERFECT kodi-experience, streams would playback smooth with nvidia-driver-304. Therefore it would be much more desirable to have nvidia-driver-304 working again on xorg-server-1.20 that bothering about nouveau.
 
cabriofahrer said:
My conclusion thus: nouveau is useless and not worth porting it! If not even kodi works, what is it good for, then?
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This is where I would chip in and suggest that not everyone's use-case involves running a media center like kodi on their computer.

That said, Nouveau worked great in my tests with VLC and even a custom VR game with the HTC Vive. It is getting pretty good in my opinion and most of all, it might put a *tiny* bit of pressure on NVIDIA to show them that the world is likely trying to move on without them.
 
We all have different needs and different experiences. All I can say with my hardware (i7-8700, 48GB Ram and geforce1080) nouveau is quite good for all my purposes on Linux. And I have experienced no crashes whatsoever and good speed. But it is a long time since I have tried ubuntu (+10 years). But this thread is about Freebsd. And the nvidia driver is OK and better than framebuffer in X11. But I prefer using free software. Nouveau is still present in Netbsd for 2D. I might try that out some time.
 
I would have to say that recent experience indicates that Nouveau did not work that well on AlmaLinux-8.3 a RedHat equivalent.
My other experience with it is dated, but I do remember it used to often freeze my machine with no indication of why, this was probably on Fedora, around 2007-2013 or so.
And larshenrikoern experience seems to indicate that it's improved. But, as they also say, this is about FreeBSD. :)

On FreeBSD, I've never used it. While it would be good to have a completely opensource Nvidia driver, the driver available in ports has always worked well for me.
 
me too.I want to use Nouveau driver on FreeBSD . re-adding the Nouveau driver to the ports and bineries would be a perfect job.
 
scottro said:
On FreeBSD, I've never used it. While it would be good to have a completely opensource Nvidia driver, the driver available in ports has always worked well for me.
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Unfortunately Nouveau isn't currently available on FreeBSD.

However the future looks positive. One day if NVIDIA does drop their blob, I am sure Nouveau will be in a even better state by then and looking at the existing work on the Intel / AMD DRM drivers, I am sure we will get it ported.

Luckily, unless you really need to avoid proprietary blobs out of principle, there is no real rush.
 
Off course. No rushing. Just a little friendly pressure :). I always try to avoid blobs. They contain bugs you know. And in the last couple of months one of nvidias employees is beginning to contribute. So that might be a sign of what to expect some day in the future. I do not think they have contributed to nouveau in the past.
 
larshenrikoern said:
I always try to avoid blobs. They contain bugs you know.
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Just because it's a blob doesn't infer it's buggy. I'm actually quite pleased with the state of the NVidia driver on FreeBSD. NVidia regularly releases a new version of the driver, it's the same "blob" on Windows as on Linux and FreeBSD. So the driver is always on-par performance wise.
 
I am not saying that Nvidias driver is very buggy. I claim it contains bugs that we cant see as it is closed source, as all software contains bugs. I find it a bit strange that Freebsd is trying to avoid software that contains GPL, but accept closed source as a fine solution in this situation. Nvidia has in the last 1½ year been giving quite a lot of information about their architecture to the opensource world https://github.com/nvidia/open-gpu-doc. The remaining main problem is that nvidias newer cards requires a signed firmware to raise the clock speed. I cant currently see a solution to this.

The stability and speed of the linux nouveau driver is sufficient for most things including a bit of gaming, but I am sure the Nvidia driver is quite a lot faster. I could of course use the scfb driver or buy another card. But I might as wait until my next machine.

As I previously told I am trying to avoid blobs as much as possible. But of course it is there in the bios and some internal firmware on the machine. I am not going completely GNU about it. I do in fact prefer the BSD model of doing things :).
 
larshenrikoern said:
I find it a bit strange that Freebsd is trying to avoid software that contains GPL, but accept closed source as a fine solution in this situation.
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The removal/avoidance of GPL is only for the base OS because it's incompatible with the BSD license. Please understand there is a distinct separation between the OS itself and third party software. Third party software aka "ports" are an entirely different matter, they're not part of the OS and can have any license.
 
I did indeed see the argument about xorg not beeing a part of the base OS as an argument for not allowing open source in this case. And I do ofcourse know this destinction. It is the hallmark of the BSD's. But that is in my humble opinion a sort of anti argument in this case. I could as well install Win10 in a wm and declare that freebsd is running all windows software (and it would certainly be true. But with a twist).

This discussion is for me not about being right or wrong, it is all about choice. I prefer in all cases possible open source, and do not want closed source although it works. And I know I have the choice of using the scfb driver. But that is to slow, much slower than noveau last i tried it (on dragonfly). So I choose not to use it.

I do as well know the argument "If it isn't broke don't fix it". And I know the nouveau driver was broken when Freebsd had it back in the days. So I know why it was removed. What I am trying to say. I do not think it is not the case any more.

I do as well know that the Nvidia is the only commercial driver on freebsd. And that the community is proud of that is understandable.
 
larshenrikoern said:
And I know the nouveau driver was broken when Freebsd had it back in the days. So I know why it was removed. What I am trying to say. I do not think it is not the case any more.
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As far as I know we have never had Nouveau support. Yes, we did have the Xorg "plugin driver" at one point but as you can see here:
x11-drivers/xf86-video-nouveau: Not supported, missing kernel support.
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So as I understand it, it was to simply remove it from Xorg so people didn't accidentally keep running a stub driver.

It isn't about licensing or anything like this (especially since all of our "borrowed" Linux drm drivers are in ports anyway). This is purely that no-one has stepped up to the (admittedly complex) task yet to actually make a FreeBSD compatible kernel module. I strongly believe it will happen one day (though I think it is equally likely that NVIDIA opens theirs).

A little out of date, but the following suggests that there is an ongoing effort to port Nouveau:

https://wiki.freebsd.org/DriDrivers

shkhln said:
FTFY.
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You say that, but I have done the research. Please see below:
hl3_confirmed.jpg
 
The Nouveau driver worked up to a point, until their code changed to use KMS. Then it started requiring kernel functions the FreeBSD kernel didn't have at that time. I've actually used that driver, wasn't too happy with it, it didn't work that well back then.
 
larshenrikoern said:
I have my information on the old freebsd nouveau from here: https://www.freshports.org/x11-drivers/xf86-video-nouveau. And it was broken on some point
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Yep, I believe it was the same thing.

X11 drivers are really two parts. The parts in the kernel (or kernel modules) and the Xorg driver shim (to hook it to Xorg). Nouveau lacked the kernel parts.

SirDice said:
The Nouveau driver worked up to a point, until their code changed to use KMS. Then it started requiring kernel functions the FreeBSD kernel didn't have at that time. I've actually used that driver, wasn't too happy with it, it didn't work that well back then.
Click to expand...

Do you recall it ever working? I thought it was merely the Xorg parts that came from upstream but we never had the kernel support to drive it.
 
And, for the record, we don't need any convincing, none of us are going to work on porting Nouveau no matter what. It's not something one just does on a whim. Well, unless they really want to study the Linux graphics driver stack, I suppose.
 
I am not trying to convince anyone to make any whimps. That will not be a good thing :rolleyes:. Well, the job has been done for the Intel and Amd drivers stack. And one thing that has happened in the last 1½ year is that Nvidia has provided a lot of documentation for the opensource world. So it is another situation than before. I could also think Nvidia is giving the information with a purpose. To get it used. One of their developers are btw. actively working on the nouveau stack in the Linux kernel
 
kpedersen said:
Do you recall it ever working?
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I have tried it once, yes. It worked back then. But that was many years ago, the port was deprecated 6 years ago, so it must have been long before that. If I recall correctly it was around the time it was first added to the ports tree, that happened in 2009, so I'm guessing at least 10 years ago.
 
larshenrikoern said:
The stability and speed of the linux nouveau driver is sufficient for most things including a bit of gaming, but I am sure the Nvidia driver is quite a lot faster.
Click to expand...
That is an overstatement when you look at these benchmarks here:

The NVIDIA vs. Open-Source Nouveau Linux Driver Benchmarks For Summer 2018 - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com www.phoronix.com

I was very disappointed when I read this. Simply ridiculous. So my conclusion for nouveau: No Kodi and very poor gaming -> pointless.
I am really pissed off for the dropping of support by Nvidia for older cards.
 
Well, I use nouveau right now on my gentoo system. And it is currently fast enough to play most games well (Xonotic, Alien Arena) on my GT-1080. So I am satsified with its performance. The nvidia driver is closed source and has it problems as well. And to me that is not acceptable. The driver has improved quite a bit since this very old benchmark, Nvidia employees are beginning to help with development as well. And it is much faster than the scfb driver anyway. That driver as an open driver is for me emergency only.
 
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