Open Source Drivers on Linux
in
Integration and Hardware
•
1 year ago
Previously I have always recommended (
and used) the latest NVIDIA drivers for NVIDIA graphics cards on linux. However it may not always be necessary to use manufacturers drivers in the near future. I have just done a fresh install of
Aptosid (that defaults to use the Nouveau drivers), Aptosid is supposed to be leading edge Debian but the default kernel is only 2.6.37, I tend to roll my own kernels so I'm using a 3.5.2 version (built with Nouveau driver options). I installed
libgl1-mesa-dri-experimental for gallium 3D acceleration, and here's what I get when I run:-
direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.4
server glx extensions:
client glx vendor string: Mesa Project and SGI
client glx version string: 1.4
client glx extensions:
OpenGL vendor string: nouveau
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on NV96 <I've got a budget priced 9500gt graphics card>
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 8.0.4
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.20
OpenGL extensions:
Anyway the 3D performance was pretty damn good with both processing-1.5.1 and processing-2.0a8 and even more heresy seems to run pretty well with openjdk.
One error that was reported in the console on a few sketches, but only with processing-2.0 was this one (also with oracles jdk):-
- glxinfo|egrep '(direct|glx|OpenGL)'
direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: SGI
server glx version string: 1.4
server glx extensions:
client glx vendor string: Mesa Project and SGI
client glx version string: 1.4
client glx extensions:
OpenGL vendor string: nouveau
OpenGL renderer string: Gallium 0.4 on NV96 <I've got a budget priced 9500gt graphics card>
OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 8.0.4
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.20
OpenGL extensions:
Anyway the 3D performance was pretty damn good with both processing-1.5.1 and processing-2.0a8 and even more heresy seems to run pretty well with openjdk.
One error that was reported in the console on a few sketches, but only with processing-2.0 was this one (also with oracles jdk):-
- join_values_nofail:398 - failed to coalesce values
As a possible tune-up I enabled MSI for the nouveau driver (you can also do this for the proprietary driver 'nvidia'), this is done by creating a file nouveau.conf in /etc/modprobe.d folder, with the following line (depends on MSI in kernel).
[drm] nouveau 0000:02:00.0: enabled MSI
Will be different depending on which bus graphics card runs.
- options nouveau msi=1
- dmesg|grep MSI
[drm] nouveau 0000:02:00.0: enabled MSI
Will be different depending on which bus graphics card runs.