How to make the nouveau driver actually to work

[Hal V. Engel]

On Tuesday 05 June 2007 17:15, kilgota at banach.math.auburn.edu wrote:
> Very likely, this is a small problem and I do not know the right trick to
> use to get past it:
>
> I have followed the instructions for building the drm module and the
> nouveau module and the nouveau X11 driver. Now, when I actually want to
> test it, the following things occur.
>
> Upon starting X I get a black screen with a little watch face in the
> middle. Things never get past that point, no matter how long I wait. The
> only thing to do is Cntrl-Alt-Backspace to kill it.
>
> Log files do not seem to show any obvious problem occurring; they look
> pretty much the same as they do if X is working properly, but with
> "nouveau" in all of the places where one would see "nv".
>
> The card is supposed to be supported just fine. It is not a new one, but
> is an old GeForce2, with 64M of RAM on it. Here is what lspci has to say
> about it
>
> 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation NV11 [GeForce2 MX/MX
> 400] (rev b2)
>
> What am I missing? As I said, it must be obvious but I do not know.
>
> Theodore Kilgore

You might have better luck getting a useful answer if you try asking this on 
the nouveau IRC channel.

This driver is still in the very early stages of development and it is 
probably something close to miraculous if it works at all.  I see on their 
web site that they do have REnouveau dumps for the NV11 cards but that does 
not mean that any developer has looked at the dumps in any detail or 
implemented anything for this GPU.

From the last News update on the web site:

"Work continues on the NV1x range of cards. Matc, pmdata and others did 
further tests. Currently the cards crashes when certain viewport commands are 
issued. Marcheu is quite certain that it did work, according to his notes and 
the commits to git around March, 10th. Remarks within TiNDC #15 seem to 
support that. As currently all cards up to NV3x crash when VIEWPORT_ORIGIN is 
set, a commit after that date must have broken this feature. Still matc is 
hunting the bug."

The above was as of May 26.  So unless matc has found the bug in the last 9 
days you are problably SOL at this time.

My understanding from looking around their web site is that the NV4x cards are 
currently the best supported.  That would be the 6000 and 7000 series of 
cards.

Hal