mesa-dri-drivers-experimental

[GoinEasy9]

Using nouveau instead of binary blobs for 3D is exciting. I have a Nvidia 9800 card, dual screen and the mesa-dri-drivers are working fine, and the fact that no xorg.conf is needed makes me even happier. Am I correct in assuming that all it would take to upgrade to the experimental drivers is a:
yum install mesa-dri-drivers-experimental ?
It seems like all the dependencies are the same. I just want to check to see if any other tweaks need to be made before I start experimenting.

[lovenemesis]

From the experience of previous AMD R600 mesa 3D support, no extra tweak is needed. KMS will handle all of them.

[leigh123linux]

Using nouveau instead of binary blobs for 3D is exciting. I have a Nvidia 9800 card, dual screen and the mesa-dri-drivers are working fine, and the fact that no xorg.conf is needed makes me even happier. Am I correct in assuming that all it would take to upgrade to the experimental drivers is a:
yum install mesa-dri-drivers-experimental ?
It seems like all the dependencies are the same. I just want to check to see if any other tweaks need to be made before I start experimenting.


It didn't work for me with my 7600GT.

[hephasteus]

It didn't work for me with my 7600GT.

It's weird. The 7600GT would have to follow the device lost behavior and actually need what they seem to be doing. Yet they seem to have it working with newer cards. Also this is where HUGE changes occur between 686 and x64. Which seems to make sense aobout why they dumped the i586 and i386 before setting this ship asail.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940105

[GoinEasy9]

Well, I noticed Leigh also has a How-To on Compiz-Fusion. I guess I'll get to trying that out eventually. But, on my production machines I do need Google Earth, and, that IS working on F13 with nouveau and the mesa experimental drivers. While it might be nice to show off workspaces on a cube, I don't need it for everyday use. I think I can live without binary blobs and xorg.conf. Nice going Nouveau devs.

[Demz]

leigh just loves his blob he wouldnt give it up for the world :D , maybe its time to update your Vid card leigh?

[jvillain]

If any one wants to try it just run the install and do the reboot. If you don't like he results then just uninstall it and reboot again. It's awfully low risk.

[GoinEasy9]

I did just that and it does the 3D I need it to do just fine. First time is always scary though. Like...should I cut the red wire...or the black wire..... and one doesn't want to hear the word "opps" after.

[marvin_ita]

I'm getting very low performance with flash videos... I suspect the video acceleration is not yet supported by the experimental drivers?
I'm using an ATI 4850 with open source ati drivers... anyone has the same problem?

[hephasteus]

I'm getting very low performance with flash videos... I suspect the video acceleration is not yet supported by the experimental drivers?
I'm using an ATI 4850 with open source ati drivers... anyone has the same problem?

I'm on windows for the moment. Rare to catch me here. The flash player under windows is messing up the screen with acceleration but it only does it on videos when it's about to do spyware stuff. So all I can say is I hope flash never works "right" under linux because the corporate sociopaths are out in full force and they are going to jump you and root kit you on gpu sometime when you get bored and weak and decide to watch a hulu video. And linux will fall for it. You can't make it secure when you have this many "cores" able to talk to each other and use a shared memory pool like the frame buffer to run code that is so complex it will likely be a decade before people figure out what they've done.

[rockdoctor]

My video card: nvidia 9100 (onboard). Running the i686 version on my x86_64 desktop.
Result: Works for me. Not as fast as the proprietary nvidia driver (~400 fps for glxgears vs. ~1300 fps w/ nvidia driver), but good enough. Approximately 25% faster and 20% less CPU usage than without mesa-dri-drivers-experimental.

[GoinEasy9]

@rockdoctor
I agree, not as fast as nvidia driver, but it's working fast enough for what I use it for.

[PGHammer]

From the experience of previous AMD R600 mesa 3D support, no extra tweak is needed. KMS will handle all of them.

I did *not* try the experimental support for R600 before (I assume you meant either Rawhide or F12?); however, I am using the experimental support with F13. With KMS in place, DRI2 is more stable, even with Mesa (I had actually despaired of DRI2 *ever* becoming stable with Mesa, let alone the combo of Mesa and AMD graphics hardware). At some point I may do some extended testing with compiz.

[lovenemesis]

I also tested nouveau gallium3d support in mesa-dri-drivers-experimental. Stable but slower than binary one.

[PGHammer]

I also tested nouveau gallium3d support in mesa-dri-drivers-experimental. Stable but slower than binary one.

I'm actually pleasantly surprised by the compiz (especially with KDE) support in mesa-dri-drivers-experimental. Mixing KDE and compiz is usually quite bad (especially since KDE 4.x has seen major improvements in KWin that had threatened to make compiz OBE (Overtaken By Events, as in "obsolete")). Now you can bring in the experimental drivers, KDE 4.4.1, and use compiz (not KWin) as the KDE compositing engine, and see stability get better (especially if the desktop effects are turned on). As I pointed out, KWin now is no slouch in the stability department.

I've actually gone further on a limb than I ever have with Linux (when it comes to Linux, I'm such a n00b I'm conservative to the point of being "chicken").

[hephasteus]

How did you get it working. I installed 13 on P4 with 7600GS and it didn't install the library files to enable 3d. I got no nouveau_dri.so in my /usr/lib/dri directory. Do you have to install experimental package to get it?

[lovenemesis]

How did you get it working. I installed 13 on P4 with 7600GS and it didn't install the library files to enable 3d. I got no nouveau_dri.so in my /usr/lib/dri directory. Do you have to install experimental package to get it?

su -c 'yum install mesa-dri-drivers-experimental'

After installation, restart the system to have the module loaded.

[hephasteus]

su -c 'yum install mesa-dri-drivers-experimental'

After installation, restart the system to have the module loaded.

Thank you. Once I finish seeding back the x86_64 and i686 torrents I'll change back over to that box and try it. I've never downloaded an alpha. I'm used to the beta's and releases where they have so many seeds I don't mind dumping seeding at 30 percent. :eek:

The 64 alpha torrent is getting thin now but the i686 one just keeps getting new downloaders.

[AdamW]

You don't actually even need to reboot (or even restart X) after installing or removing mesa-dri-drivers-experimental, because 3D stuff is handled completely separately. The only thing you'd need to do is restart any app that's actually using 3D. If you just install the package, don't restart X or reboot, and enable compiz, it works right away. Neat, huh?

Video playback acceleration has nothing to do with 3D acceleration, they're totally separate things. Ben tells me video playback acceleration isn't something that can be implemented very quickly, it's months or a couple of years, not weeks.

[hephasteus]

You don't actually even need to reboot (or even restart X) after installing or removing mesa-dri-drivers-experimental, because 3D stuff is handled completely separately. The only thing you'd need to do is restart any app that's actually using 3D. If you just install the package, don't restart X or reboot, and enable compiz, it works right away. Neat, huh?

Video playback acceleration has nothing to do with 3D acceleration, they're totally separate things. Ben tells me video playback acceleration isn't something that can be implemented very quickly, it's months or a couple of years, not weeks.

They can just drop video playback acceleration in a grave for all I care. I took my overclock/underclock off and set my computer up so that cpu on demand could function and it settles in at 1ghz and stays there. My cpu can decode any video on less electricity than any video card. It decodes 720 p at 1ghz on averaging about 20 to 30 percent usage. The only thing is cpu on demand isn't saving me any juice and it makes system sluggish. But I just wanted to let it finally do it. The 13 box with p4 northwood can do any video easily too. It just sucks about 45 watts doing it instead of 20 like the new cpu does. So hardware decoding would be great if cpu's were 6 years old and gpu's were newer than they even are now. Because it's just not worth getting them into 3d clocks any more.

[GoinEasy9]

Under the title Video Acceleration and You a little way down the page, it seems like there are other ways to increase Video Acceleration than just by using the GPU.
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html

[AdamW]

They can just drop video playback acceleration in a grave for all I care. I took my overclock/underclock off and set my computer up so that cpu on demand could function and it settles in at 1ghz and stays there. My cpu can decode any video on less electricity than any video card. It decodes 720 p at 1ghz on averaging about 20 to 30 percent usage. The only thing is cpu on demand isn't saving me any juice and it makes system sluggish. But I just wanted to let it finally do it. The 13 box with p4 northwood can do any video easily too. It just sucks about 45 watts doing it instead of 20 like the new cpu does. So hardware decoding would be great if cpu's were 6 years old and gpu's were newer than they even are now. Because it's just not worth getting them into 3d clocks any more.

It is, however, extremely useful if you're on an Atom CPU (or any other slow, cheap+small-aimed CPU).

Even on my HTPC - which is running a Pentium E2180, which sure isn't the fastest thing in history, but isn't really terrible either - VDPAU playback with the NVIDIA 9600 GT it has in it is noticeably smoother than CPU playback, even though CPU playback doesn't max out the CPU according to top.

[lmcogs]

It didn't work for me with my 7600GT.

Also didn't work for me on geforce 9800GT

[GoinEasy9]

Leigh, as I remember, said he got it working.
I wonder what the difference is, my 9800GT gets excellent results.

System: Host Fedora13dw32 Kernel 2.6.33.1-24.fc13.i686.PAE i686 (32 bit) Distro Fedora release 13 (Goddard)
CPU: Quad core AMD Phenom II X4 955 (SMP) cache 2048 KB flags (lm nx sse sse2 sse3 sse4a svm) bmips 25602.6
Clock Speeds: (1) 800.00 MHz (2) 800.00 MHz (3) 800.00 MHz (4) 800.00 MHz
Graphics: Card nVidia G92 [GeForce 9800 GT] Fedora 1.8 Res: 1920x1080@60.0hz, 1920x1080@60.0hz
GLX Renderer Gallium 0.4 on NV92 GLX Version 2.1 Mesa 7.8-devel Direct Rendering Yes

[helloworld1]

afaik, mesa-dri-drivers-experimental only provide one file /usr/lib64/dri/r600_dri.so, why bother installing it on nv machines?

[JEO]

afaik, mesa-dri-drivers-experimental only provide one file /usr/lib64/dri/r600_dri.so, why bother installing it on nv machines?

That was true for Fedora 12. Fedora 13 has:

/usr/lib64/dri/nouveau_dri.so 2178608
/usr/lib64/dri/nouveau_vieux_dri.so 2108752

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/rpminfo?rpmID=1913988

[helloworld1]

That was true for Fedora 12. Fedora 13 has:

/usr/lib64/dri/nouveau_dri.so 2178608
/usr/lib64/dri/nouveau_vieux_dri.so 2108752

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/rpminfo?rpmID=1913988

I have installed F13 and see I am wrong.

[bakerboy26]

It runs ok as long as I don't go to desktop effects and select compiz. I get a messed up, garbels screen.

Fedora 13 Beta, onboard Nvidia GeForce 6100 nForce 405

Gordy

[brunson]

It runs ok as long as I don't go to desktop effects and select compiz. I get a messed up, garbels screen.

Fedora 13 Beta, onboard Nvidia GeForce 6100 nForce 405

Gordy

Have you run anything 3D accelerated yet? Like Google Earth?

[GoinEasy9]

I'm running Google Earth, have experimented with Compiz, 3D games, and have them all running satisfactory. The only important package that I cannot run using the experimental drivers is Blender. I don't really use Blender, but I installed it to test. So experimental drivers are still experimental, but, they work well enough that I don't need to install the Nvidia blob on most of my F13 installs.

[brunson]

Nice. I hardly use any 3D applications, all I need is Google Earth and multi head support.

Thanks for the info.

[bakerboy26]

Have you run anything 3D accelerated yet? Like Google Earth?

Yep, working great with Google Earth.. its only when I try to activate compiz is when the the screen gets messed up..

Gordy