Fedora to use Nouveau driver for Nvidia graphics

The Fedora Project has selected Nouveau as the default driver for Nvidia graphics hardware in Fedora 11, the next version of the Fedora operating system. The Nouveau code replaces the aging nv driver (xf86-video-nv driver), which, however, will remain an option. Since August of 2008, development of nv has gone a bit quiet. Requests for support for newer Nvidia chipsets have often fallen on deaf ears. Support requested for the GeForce 9000 series GPUs has been turned down, due to being too complicated.

The aim of the Nouveau project is, through reverse engineering, to develop an open source graphics driver with 3D acceleration as an open source alternative to Nvidia's proprietary driver. Since early 2008 the project has used the Gallium3D library for 3D acceleration. Nouveau supports more chipsets than nv, supports RandR 1.2, accelerated XRENDER for chipsets from NV10 (GeForce 3) and textured video for all chipsets from NV30 upwards. The Gallium3D driver is not yet stable enough to enable it by default, so Nouveau will likely only support 2D in Fedora 11. The final version of Fedora 11 is scheduled for a late May 2009 release.

See also:

• Ext4 to be standard for Fedora 11, Btrfs also included, a report from The H.
• Fedora 11 release name chosen, a report from The H.
• New installation DVDs for Fedora, a report from The H.
• New Nvidia driver for Linux, a report from The H.

(crve)