- Nouveau (graphics)
of renouveau in action (renouveau is the blue window in the top left corner)]
nouveau is an
X.Org Foundation andFreedesktop.org project which was initially based on the obfuscated 2D-only free and open source "nv" driver, aiming to develop free software drivers forNVIDIA graphics cards , byreverse engineering NVIDIA's current proprietary drivers forLinux .Like most other 3D graphics drivers for
X.Org , nouveau is implemented as a module and is licensed under the MIT license. It originally used theDirect Rendering Infrastructure ofMesa 3D for rendering3D computer graphics which allows to accelerate 3D drawing using thegraphics processing unit , directly from the 3D application, but in February 2008 the work on DRI support ceased and moved on to the new Gallium3D. [Cite web
url = http://lwn.net/Articles/270830/
title = The state of Nouveau, part 2
publisher =LWN.net
lang = en
date = 2008-02-26
accessdate = 2008-03-07] [Cite web
url = http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/Nouveau_Companion_36
title = Nouveau Companion 36
lang = en
datepublished = 2008-03-07
accessdate = 2008-03-07]Tools
The project uses several custom made programs for its reverse engineering, such as mmio-trace and renouveau.
Renouveau
Renouveau stands for most of the reverse engineering work. Users with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers can help the development of nouveau by providing information about the hardware of their NVIDIA cards. This is done running renouveau on their computers. Renouveau works by copying the current graphics card
MMIO register space, drawing some graphics and taking another copy of the MMIO, and outputting the difference to a text file. It runs slightly over 70 different tests which the user of the computer then makes atar .bz2 archive of and submits it bye-mail , after which it is automatically transferred to the project's FTP servers for the developers to analyze.Renouveau is licensed under the GPL and is built on SDL's rendering technology.
See also
*
Graphics hardware and FOSS External links
* [http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/ The nouveau project's official wiki website]
* [http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/REnouveauDumps Renouveau]
* [http://sourceforge.net/projects/nouveau nouveau's SourceForge project]References
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