I recently switched from the proprietary NVIDIA drivers to nouveau on 11.4. Did this to avoid the need to update every time a new kernel was installed. I generally compile the latest stable from kernel.org and in any case object to proprietary drivers. After much grief due to conflicting on line documentation and some applications putting out of date shared objects in /usr/local/lib (which is searched before /usr/lib by ld.so) I have it working at 1440x900 on my 19" LCD monitor. None the less, there is still minor monitor flicker and I was wondering if the nouveau repositories bound to OpenSuse are a better source of drivers than the default ones. Also, are the mesa drivers a problem?
Note that my /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/monitors.conf file has its modes set using cvt(1). For example
cvt 1440 900 60
on the assumption that 60Hz should work. Note that the monitor was NOT automatically detected by the OS; not sure why since another machine running a customized Linux setup connected to the monitor though a KVM switch does detect it.
Thanks in advance!
billmoss@acm.org
On 11/13/2011 10:16 AM, billmoss wrote:
>
> I recently switched from the proprietary NVIDIA drivers to nouveau on
> 11.4. Did this to avoid the need to update every time a new kernel was
> installed. I generally compile the latest stable from kernel.org and in
> any case object to proprietary drivers. After much grief due to
> conflicting on line documentation and some applications putting out of
> date shared objects in /usr/local/lib (which is searched before /usr/lib
> by ld.so) I have it working at 1440x900 on my 19" LCD monitor. None the
> less, there is still minor monitor flicker and I was wondering if the
> nouveau repositories bound to OpenSuse are a better source of drivers
> than the default ones. Also, are the mesa drivers a problem?
The nouveau repos bound to openSUSE (note spelling) are not likely to be better
than those of the mainline kernel. The structure of kernel development is as
follows: When a new kernel version is formed, there is a period of time, usually
two weeks, when Linus merges the new features from the linux-next tree. Once
this merge is over, he releases -rc1. From that point until the next merge
window opens, only bug fixes and new device IDs are permitted. The new material
for linux-next comes from the repositories maintained by each group, which I
think for nouveau is the drm tree at
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/airlied/drm-2.6.git. At the
current time, Linus has version 3.2, linux-next is morphing into 3.3, and the
group repos are a mixture of stuff that will eventually be in 3.3 or even 3.4.
The downside of the group repos is that this code may not have had much testing.
Note that my /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/monitors.conf file has its modes set using cvt(1). For example
cvt 1440 900 60
on the assumption that 60Hz should work. Note that the monitor was NOT automatically detected by the OS; not sure why since another machine running a customized Linux setup connected to the monitor though a KVM switch does detect it.
Does the other machine (with successful detection) use the nouveau driver too?
What kernel version does that use?
What version of Mesa packages are installed?
rpm -qa |grep Mesa
It might be possible to upgrade these packages. Have a search of
software.opensuse.org: Download openSUSE 11.4
Click on ‘Search Options’ and enable ‘Users home projects’. If you search for ‘Mesa-nouveau3d’, you’ll find a few OBS project packages available with more recent builds. The latest I saw was ‘7.11.99.git…’. Now, I can’t promise better performance, so your in the realm of experimentation here. YMMV.
Another approach maybe to try a recent LiveDVD distro (maybe openSUSE 12.1), and note whether have better graphics performance from those with the nouveau + mesa (with Gallium3D) drivers.
rpm -qa | grep -i mesa
Mesa-devel-7.10.2-7.3.1.i586
DirectFB-Mesa-1.4.5-14.2.i586
Mesa-7.10.2-7.3.1.i586
Mesa-nouveau3d-7.10.2-7.3.1.i586
All packages are kept up to date using the standard repositories and
zypper ref && zypper up
uname -a
Linux bbunny 2.6.37.6-0.9-default #1 SMP 2011-10-19 22:33:27 +0200 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux
Other machine uses an ATI card with a custom compiled 3.0.8 Kernel.
I have another machine running 12.1RC2 connected to a different LCD monitor but will connect it to this one to see what happens. 12.1 seems to be far superior to 11.4.