Nouveau and PowerPC Apple machines

 Proprietary drivers. They are a thorn in the side of many a Linux distribution (and end user). The two remaining strongholds today are video cards, specifically those from AMD and NVIDIA. This is especially true for our friends who are still working on those PowerPC machines having ATI and NVIDIA video cards installed. For these people there is only the open source nv driver for NVIDIA cards and the open source ati driver for the ATI cards, which lacks features like 3D-acceleration. It was open source and nevertheless, it was something.

In 2006, the nouveau project was born with the goal of building “high-quality, open source drivers for NVIDIA cards.” It was based around the idea of reverse engineering graphics cards running NVIDIA’s proprietary driver under Linux. For this purpose, the REnouveau program was created to collect information useful to the project. As you could imagine, it’s a long and arduous task!

In 2007, the nouveau driver became pretty stable, offering 2D support for NVIDIA cards which outperformed the nv driver. In December 2009, nouveau was brought into the mainline kernel staging tree, where it has undergone wider exposure. As a result, we expect the driver to improve rapidly - NVIDIA cards are very popular in Apple machines.

Fedora has been an early supporter of the nouveau project, indeed several nouveau developers are Red Hat employees. An alpha version with release Fedora 7 in mid 2007 and with version 11, nouveau became the default driver for NVIDIA cards. Kernel based mode-setting was enabled by default in version 12. Now, Fedora 13 which is due out in three months, will include support for 3D, thanks to Gallium3D - a new library for 3D graphics device drivers.

It turns out that simple 3D-acceleration is now possible with Nouveau. It was shown that Compiz works on a NVIDIA 8800GT video card. It is unknown how the NVIDIA cards found in Apple PowerPC hardware will perform with this driver. This is something of the future. As can be seen from the following tables, NVIDIA is present across the whole line of PowerPC models, except for the iBooks, they all have ATI cards. People are encouraged to try this driver in the future and to let us know how it performs.