StockBugzillaResponses updated, nVidia question

[Matej Cepl]

Christopher Beland, Thu, 28 May 2009 02:31:22 -0400:
>> > to the open source "xf86-video-nouveau" driver, which will be
>> > available in Fedora 11.  (Will it be backported to 9 and 10 as well?)

There was nouveau driver in Fedora Xorg like since forever (certainly F8, 
maybe even F7, not sure about that), which in its later versions (for 
sure F10) worked for some (emphasizing *some*) better than -nv, so I was 
suggesting it over -nvidia, when somebody smallest willingness to leave 
THAT THING. However, it was certainly something which nobody could trust 
his life, honour, and welfare to.

Unfortunately F11 nouveau will almost certianly not be ported to F10, 
because it is (as all other KMS drivers) tightly linked to the 
development in kernel, and I am afraid nobody will port all KMS kernel 
patches to F10.

>> > It was also unclear whether "xf86-video-nv" is open source enough not
>> > to warrant the "proprietary driver" response, or what.

-nv is a difficult beast. From the legal standpoint it is pure open 
source (MIT/X11 license as the rest of Xorg), but from the programmer's 
point of view it is more complicated ... it has been maintained only by 
one nVidia employee, source is largely undocumented, some would say even 
obfuscated, and extremely difficult to deal with. So, yes it is open 
source (it is in Fedora, right?)

> There doesn't seem to be a good page with step-by-step instructions for
> F9 or F10 conversion, so I was vague.  Probably this will become less of
> an issue as those versions are EOL'd anyway.

I hope upgrade from F9/F10 should work automagically.

Much more interesting than how to install -{nv,nouveau} is how to get rid 
of -nvidia goo which stays on the disk (unless rpm from The Repository 
Which Shall Not Be Named is used, which quite often isn't). Mike Harris 
my esteemed predecessor in Xorg bug triaging wrote a long piece on this 
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Xorg/3rd_Party_Video_Drivers (which 
somebody cleaned up recently for English; thank you!).

Matěj