[ubuntu-x] Nouveau: what's happening upstream, what it means for Lucid

[Christopher James Halse Rogers]

I've been following what's happening upstream with respect to nouveau,
and there have been a couple of interesting events.

Firstly, nouveau is now in staging in Linus' tree[1]. Commit id is
9764757932ce26f139332f89d1d3b815e4cc56ab.
So, for Lucid+1 it looks like we won't have to do anything special to
get nouveau.

For Lucid, we can do a number of things:
1) A nouveau module slightly older than the one pushed to Linus can
happily build & run against an almost-unmodified Lucid drm.ko.  This
option looks pretty safe, at least as far as breaking unrelated drm
drivers.  There's a proof-of-concept “nouveau-scratchpad" branch of
Lucid's 2.6.32-7 kernel with the nouveau bits dropped in at
cooperteam.net/kernel-lucid-nouveau.git.  This will make it more
difficult to pull upstream bugfixes, but is the safest way to get an
in-kernel nouveau.ko.

2) We can try and pull nouveau from Linus' tree.  This is more
difficult, as it requires some changes in drm & ttm; specifically the
factoring out of displayport support into drm_kms_helper, and changes in
the ttm_placement APIs, which will affect i915 and radeon, respectively.

3) Do something different; either an out of tree backports module, or
keep updating the nouveau-kernel-source dkms package.

[1]
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commit;h=9764757932ce26f139332f89d1d3b815e4cc56ab