-nouveau now set as the default driver for Nvidia hardware / PPC kernel module

[Vlado Plaga]

Am Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:25:20 -0400
schrieb sonicmctails at gmail.com (Michael Casadevall):

> It is intentionally disabled due to it not properly functioning on
> powerpc .

It was an unpleasant surprise for me to learn that Ubuntu 10.04 would
not support the nouveau X driver on my computer (an old PPC iMac)!
After all, PowerPCs benefit most from nouveau, for they don't get the
official NVidia driver. I have been using nouveau extensively in Debian
"unstable" for about a month now, and I only had two or three X freezes
in that period. 

But Ubuntu still has an advantage over Debian "unstable" (apart from not
changing critical parts of the system during future routine updates:
libdrm-nouveau1 and xserver-xorg-video-nouveau are already included in
the distribution, so the only thing it lacks is the kernel module. I
used the Debian-provided kernel 2.6.33 source[1], and took Ubuntu's
/boot/config-2.6.32-17-powerpc as a base for configuring my custom
kernel. Of course I had to enable the "nouveau" module in the staging
section, and I noticed I had to disable OSS emulation, because
otherwise the kernel failed to compile. In fact I needed quite a few
attempts, but that was largely due to problems with the initial ramdisk
not having been created even though I called make-kpkg with the
appropriate parameter. I also did not manage to use a kernel without
initrd, like I do in Debian, because then the kernel first could not
mount my root file system ("unsupported optional features"), and then,
when I appended "ro" to the kernel, it did mount them (like in Debian),
but did not automatically re-mount them "rw"...

But now I have a working nouveau kernel module in Ubuntu, and it seems
like today's new initramfs-tools also fixed the creation of kernel
packages with initrds (which before that fix I created manually).

[1] http://packages.debian.org/experimental/linux-source-2.6.33

> If you have managed to use it and got it to work, that is
> news to me; that being said I think it would be too late this cycle
> to enable it. Michael

That's bad news for PPC users who are not familiar with compiling their
own kernel.

I'm not a member of this list, so anyone replying to this message
please include my address as well!

Regards,
Vlado