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Is the nouveau driver the replacement for the "nv" open source driver for Nvidia graphics cards?

Asked by oss_test_launchpad

Or is it just some parallel development which aims at 3D?

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oss_test_launchpad (oss-test-launchpad) said : 		#1

PS Link: http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/.

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midnightflash (midnightflash) said : 		#2

It is the same one.

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oss_test_launchpad (oss-test-launchpad) said : 		#3

Thank you for this information.

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Chris Halse Rogers (raof) said : 		#4

Actually, this is incorrect. The 'nouveau' driver is NOT the same as the 'nv' driver. The 'nv' driver is maintained by an nVidia employee, and is generally fairly poor, feature-wise. It generally doesn't have good 2D acceleration, or dual-head support. 'nv' is pretty much a stop-gap for installing the nvidia binary driver or for those who don't want to run a binary blob and don't need full hardware support.

The 'nouveau' driver is a community project, forked from the 'nv' driver when the 'nv' maintainer didn't accept some patches. The nouveau project aims to replace the nvidia binary driver; it aims to support everything the binary driver does - dual-head, 3d acceleration, suspend/resume, etc. It's currently experimental, but provides very good 2D acceleration (better than the nvidia binary driver in my experience) and good dual-head features (again, better than the binary blob for my uses). 3D and suspend/resume are both highly experimental.

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oss_test_launchpad (oss-test-launchpad) said : 		#5

Thank you for this detailled answer, which helped me a lot.