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Concept
Nouveau (software)
Summary
nouveau (nu:ˈvoʊ) is a free and open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards and the Tegra family of SoCs written by independent software engineers, with minor help from Nvidia employees.
The project's goal is to create an open source driver by reverse engineering Nvidia's proprietary Linux drivers. It is managed by the X.Org Foundation, hosted by freedesktop.org, and is distributed as part of Mesa 3D. The project was initially based on the 2D-only free and open-source "nv" driver, which Red Hat developer Matthew Garrett and others claim had been obfuscated. nouveau is licensed under the MIT License.
The name of the project comes from the French word nouveau, meaning new. It was suggested by the original author, Stéphane Marchesin, after his IRC client's French-language autocorrect system offered the word "nouveau" as a correction for the letters "nv".
nouveau is a Gallium3D-style device driver and works on top of the Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI). It is composed of the two Kernel-components DRM & KMS driver, and the user-space components libDRM, and Mesa 3D.
nouveau intends to support all Nvidia microarchitectures: Tesla, Fermi, Kepler, Maxwell, in Version 1.0.13 support of Pascal and in Version 1.0.15 support of Volta. Version 1.0.16 adds support for Turing.
For technical reasons Nvidia GPUs all boot with a low frequency (called "clock"). The device driver has to set a higher frequency after booting. Due to lack of documentation of GPU, nouveau lacked this capability from the beginning on. The result was/is a major loss in performance, as proven by benchmarks which compared the performance of Nvidia proprietary device driver with nouveau's. In June 2014, a breakthrough was finally achieved and initial re-clocking support was added to nouveau. With Version 1.0.14 Pascal support is at the level of Maxwell 2. With version 1.0.15 there is a patch for GTX 970 with 4GB and accelerations of Pascal to Maxwell 2 Level.
Unlike AMD, Nvidia provides no documentation about their GPUs.
Official source
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