[ubuntu-x] Nouveau information and proposed plan

[Luis R. Rodriguez]

On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 4:07 PM, Christopher James Halse Rogers
<raof at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-11-30 at 18:57 -0600, Steve Conklin wrote:
>> This email summarizes a discussion that took place on #ubuntu-x IRC, and
>> the tentative plan that was arrived at. The IRC discussion is attached
>> for reference.
>>
>> First, there was a discussion of what is required in order to bring
>> Nouveau into our kernel. Nouveau brings in the entire drm-next tree,
>> which looks like it amounts to over 500 patches right now. This
>> presents a major issue for the kernel team, in how to manage that.
>
> I have been talking with Ben Skeggs (darktama on freenode) the nouveau
> dev paid by Red Hat, who is also deciding what to do about updating
> nouveau in Fedora rawhide.
>
> He thinks that the nouveau kernel module should work against the stock
> 2.6.32 drm tree, so I tried copying drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau and
> associated headers into the lucid kernel tree, the results of which are
> in the nouveau-scratchpad branch of
> http://cooperteam.net/lucid-kernel-nouveau.git .  The only changes
> outside of the nouveau-specific directories are hooking up the Kconfig &
> Makefiles, and exporting 4 extra symbols from ttm.ko.

Which exported symbols are those and what other new video drivers use
from the 2.6.32 drm tree?

> I've tested the resulting kernel on my laptop with a geforce 7600go; it
> works as far as I've tested - kms on boot, video playback, metacity
> compositing.  The only thing that failed was suspend, but this laptop
> wasn't suspending correctly with the out-of-tree nouveau modules,
> either, nor with nv.
>
> It might be easier to incorporate nouveau into the Lucid kernel than I
> thought.

I was just sent a patch to add more backport stuff to compat-wireless
for bluetooth so we can also carry new bluetooth changes on older
kernels. This won't seem too important until we get users wanting to
use BT 3.0 which requires hand off coordination with 802.11. We are
likely to support this on older kernels so will be supporting
backports of both the bluetooth stack and 802.11 down to 2.6.27 within
the same package but with now a generic compat.ko module. Although I
wouldn't expect video to be backported down to 2.6.27 if you just
needed 4 symbols to get the kernel drivers compiled I could just stuff
those into the generic compat tree I'm working on:

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/mcgrof/compat.git;a=summary

If ubuntu packages again compat-wireless for Lucid this would mean
having these symbols available through a generic compat module, and if
those symbols could be used by other video drivers it would also allow
backporting of those as well.

  Luis