Linux developers have long pined to use 3D acceleration with their apps using Nouveau driver. Thanks to the recent developments on the Nouveau front, coupled with a current version of libdrm, Linux apps are finally able to make use of 3D acceleration with nearly all GeForce GPUs.
Nouveau driver has been supporting acceleration features on GeForce chips for quite some time now. However, when trying to use this driver with many recent high-end chips, users had to tweak the cards manually to enable support.
Linus Torvalds recently added a number of modifications to the Nouveau driver which were meant to eliminate the need to make manual adjustment to Nvidia cards. Thanks to these modifications, which have originally been written by Red Hat’s Ben Skeggs, you can now run all GeForce GPUs together with 3D acceleration through Nouveau driver.
With these fresh modifications, the open-source Linux drivers are able to utilize the 3D acceleration feature of all the graphics chips available in the market as of right now, with the exception of a few AMD chips. Nonetheless, the ability to run the feature on all Nvidia chips is a huge convenience for the Linux users and developers.
Nouveau driver has been created by reverse-engineering Nvidia’s own software. The diligent and exceptionally bright members of the open-source community acquired all important information by reverse-engineering these software and then developing an open-source version of them. Thanks to their hard work, we today have free, open-source drivers than can run the most sophisticated parts of commercial chips’ functionality.
Courtesy: H-Online
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