Kernel and nouveau updates
In the midst of my Beagleboard frustrations, I actually have a bit of good news to report.
No, it’s not about the Beagle. That’s still a big ol’ pile o’ poop.
First is that I was digging around in the X11 overlay, and I found out what I was missing to make xf86-video-ati and KMS work on recent kernels: x11-drivers/radeon-ucode. There are a few extra steps for getting the firmware into your kernel config, but it doesn’t take long.
So now I’m finally able to use vanilla-sources 2.6.33_rc7. I’d been stuck on vanilla 2.6.32 — no additional point releases, just .32. Every other .32 release had major regressions that prevented booting.
Running .33 makes me happy. I get the newest goodies (no more need for staging drivers) and Urban Terror still runs great. KMS is even a teensy bit faster, too.
However, then I went back to using stuff from the staging drivers tree: I decided to try out Nouveau tonight. Once again, I used the ebuilds from the X11 overlay, and recompiled my kernel. To my surprise, things mostly work! In fact, I’m writing this blog post from within Xfce, running on Nouveau + KMS.
Turns out that Nouveau doesn’t really work on Geforce 8200/8300 cards, and possibly not on any IGP with shared memory. This is a known bug — in fact, I tried out Nouveau hoping to add some current testing results.
While KMS works okay (a little slower than radeon), and I can get into X just fine, performance is pretty slow once I get there. Xfwm4’s compositor is enabled, but that’s not a source of trouble. As I stated on the bug, it’s better than the proprietary nvidia-drivers, but definitely laggy. No hardware acceleration at all.
I jumped on to #nouveau to see what caused my cryptic error messages. It’s not the firmware loading that’s the problem, the problem is that the acceleration code has yet to be written for my IGP.
This just confirms what I’ve suspected ever since I purchased my motherboard in October 2008: its chipset is absolutely good-for-nothing. My system is unbearably stutter-slow when using the proprietary nvidia-drivers, which means desktop usage is out, to say nothing of games or VDPAU decoding for movies. And the nv driver still doesn’t work at all, and it wouldn’t have any kind of hardware accel anyway. The last hope, Nouveau, is sorely lacking, so I’ll just have to cross my fingers that some kind of support arrives before the ‘board is replaced.
I guess it’s back to my RadeonHD 4550: 3D and 2D are accelerated etc. Could still use power management code, and GL output or some other hardware decode logic for movies, but I’ve no real complaints. Those are all coming, fo’ sho’.
I’m interested in getting an AMD chipset-based motherboard, but every benchmark I’ve ever seen shows poor USB, SATA/AHCI, ethernet, and other peripheral performance compared to an nVidia chipset. That’s disheartening; I’d really like to go all-AMD. As long as there’s a 4000-series IGP on the board, I could even ditch the low-end 4550 I currently use and save some power and heat. There don’t seem to be many decent cheap options for microATX AMD motherboards these days.
Besides, aside from the nVidia IGP issues, I’ve no real complaints about my current mobo. You win some, you lose some.