Giving a hand to Nouveau

Giving a hand to Nouveau

[Yoann LE BARS]

Hello everybody out there!

	Well, I just subscribed to this mailing list, so I guess I should
introduce myself, at least giving relevant information about me
concerning the development of Nouveau.

	You can call me a scientist, and I am doing simulation code. Therefore,
my experience in coding is about high performance computing and
scientific visualisation–and also about teaching. I have some ideas
concerning material architectures, but I am not into system programming.
Still, concerning system programming, I do know C and I have programmed
in assembly, though these are not the languages I use the most in a
daily basis.

	Well, my main computer has an NVidia GeForce 750 GPU, and I need video
decoding as well as computing functionality. It turns out that for my
particular GPU, Nouveau is not that good in these areas.

	So, I guess I should give a hand to Nouveau developers. Therefore, here
is my questions: what is the help I can provide, knowing I am using
Debian stable (Debian 9 Stretch at the time) with backports? As it is a
production machine, I need it to stays usable and there are some other
projects I should give some times.

	Best regards.

-- 
Yoann LE BARS
http://le-bars.net/yoann/
Diaspora* : ylebars@framasphere.org
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Re: Giving a hand to Nouveau

[Ilia Mirkin]

On Sun, Jun 17, 2018 at 8:50 PM, Yoann LE BARS <yoann@le-bars.net> wrote:
>
> Hello everybody out there!
>
>         Well, I just subscribed to this mailing list, so I guess I should
> introduce myself, at least giving relevant information about me
> concerning the development of Nouveau.
>
>         You can call me a scientist, and I am doing simulation code. Therefore,
> my experience in coding is about high performance computing and
> scientific visualisation–and also about teaching. I have some ideas
> concerning material architectures, but I am not into system programming.
> Still, concerning system programming, I do know C and I have programmed
> in assembly, though these are not the languages I use the most in a
> daily basis.
>
>         Well, my main computer has an NVidia GeForce 750 GPU, and I need video
> decoding as well as computing functionality. It turns out that for my
> particular GPU, Nouveau is not that good in these areas.

Video decoding is not supported for Maxwell+. Not sure what you mean
by "computing" functionality, but e.g. OpenGL's compute shaders should
be reasonably well-supported on that GPU.

>
>         So, I guess I should give a hand to Nouveau developers. Therefore, here
> is my questions: what is the help I can provide, knowing I am using
> Debian stable (Debian 9 Stretch at the time) with backports? As it is a
> production machine, I need it to stays usable and there are some other
> projects I should give some times.

You should join us at #nouveau on irc.freenode.net to discuss further
what some suitable projects might be. I've found that people fixing
their own issues first is the best way to start in a project, since
you end up with very concrete goals.

  -ilia
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Re: Giving a hand to Nouveau

[Yoann LE BARS]

Hello everybody out there!

	Well, I forgot to actually answer to the mailing list. My apologies, Ilia.

Le 18/06/2018 à 03:19, Ilia Mirkin a écrit :
> Video decoding is not supported for Maxwell+.

	Indeed. This is one reason I guess I should try and give a hand.

> Not sure what you mean
> by "computing" functionality, but e.g. OpenGL's compute shaders should
> be reasonably well-supported on that GPU.

	Yes, I did not express myself really clearly–forgive my being French.

	When I wrote “computing”, I meant using GPU to do general purpose
computation, not only graphics. Quite common in high performance
computing: using GPU as computing accelerators.

> You should join us at #nouveau on irc.freenode.net to discuss further
> what some suitable projects might be.

	I will try to connect to it latter today.

	Best regards.

-- 
Yoann LE BARS
http://le-bars.net/yoann/
Diaspora* : ylebars@framasphere.org
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Re: Giving a hand to Nouveau

[Yoann LE BARS]

Hello everybody out there!

	I guess I should give some news.

	I am still using RT kernel on Debian stable + backports and have not
found any way to install a working NVidia proprietary driver on this
system. Therefore, I am so far not able to give any help to Nouveau
development.

	Now, I am considering three strategies:

		• Switching to Archlinux, which has an installable Nvidia proprietary
driver on RT kernel (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/nvidia-rt/).

		• Waiting for RT kernel to be mainlined, which should happen soon
(https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/realtime/start). It may be the case
before next Debian release.

		• I may build a new computer soon, which would probably use a Radeon
GPU (then I will not use Nouveau).

	Anyway, I guess I should first ask some questions to the RT
mailing-list, as I have subscribed to it.

	Best regards.

-- 
Yoann LE BARS
http://le-bars.net/yoann/
Diaspora* : ylebars@framasphere.org
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