[ubuntu-x] Nouveau information and proposed plan

[Luis R. Rodriguez]

On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 3:48 PM, Christopher James Halse Rogers
<raof at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-12-08 at 09:28 -0800, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
>> On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 4:07 PM, Christopher James Halse Rogers
>> <raof at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>> > On Mon, 2009-11-30 at 18:57 -0600, Steve Conklin wrote:
>> >> This email summarizes a discussion that took place on #ubuntu-x IRC, and
>> >> the tentative plan that was arrived at. The IRC discussion is attached
>> >> for reference.
>> >>
>> >> First, there was a discussion of what is required in order to bring
>> >> Nouveau into our kernel. Nouveau brings in the entire drm-next tree,
>> >> which looks like it amounts to over 500 patches right now. This
>> >> presents a major issue for the kernel team, in how to manage that.
>> >
>> > I have been talking with Ben Skeggs (darktama on freenode) the nouveau
>> > dev paid by Red Hat, who is also deciding what to do about updating
>> > nouveau in Fedora rawhide.
>> >
>> > He thinks that the nouveau kernel module should work against the stock
>> > 2.6.32 drm tree, so I tried copying drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau and
>> > associated headers into the lucid kernel tree, the results of which are
>> > in the nouveau-scratchpad branch of
>> > http://cooperteam.net/lucid-kernel-nouveau.git .  The only changes
>> > outside of the nouveau-specific directories are hooking up the Kconfig &
>> > Makefiles, and exporting 4 extra symbols from ttm.ko.
>>
>> Which exported symbols are those and what other new video drivers use
>> from the 2.6.32 drm tree?
>>
> The symbols are:
> ttm_bo_wait_unreserved
> ttm_bo_wait_cpu
> ttm_bo_synccpu_write_grab
> ttm_bo_synccpu_write_release
>
> None of the other drm drivers in the 2.6.32 tree use these symbols,
> although it's possible that a more recent radeon drm would; I'm not
> familiar with the radeon world.

Got it, thanks for the details.

So compat-wireless recently got a facelift and now also backports
bluetooth. A common compat.ko module is shared across both and I'd be
open to suck in the above symbols on compat-2.6.32.c and add Nouveau
to the mix. Given that Ubuntu already ships compat-wireless it would
be simple to let it select if it would also want to ship a newer
Nouveau module from this package as well.

But just a thought.

[1] http://marc.info/?l=linux-wireless&m=126052036625843&w=2

  Luis