Re: How to use x11 nouveau on NetBSD

[Pierre Pronchery <khorben%defora.org@localhost>]

                Hi Mayuresh, NetBSD users,

On Sun, 16 Dec 2012 11:42:26 +0530, Mayuresh wrote:
> 
> I have an old Nvidia GeForce3 video card, which is supported by
> xf86-video-nv x11 driver available in pkgsrc.

(if it works reasonably well, I think it is your best option with this 
hardware)

> Till now I never tried to check whether 3D games etc. would work on
> NetBSD. I decided to try out a couple of games on NetBSD - tuxracer and
> supertuxkart.
> 
> As such the acceleration these games need is not working and some

That's expected, unfortunately.

> searching around tells me that nouveau module is supposed to provide
> that.

Unfortunate also that it is not as simple as that.

> Unlike other platforms where there is xf86-video-nouveau, on NetBSD
> there is libdrm_nouveau.so.

These are two different things. Both would actually be required, and then 
more; but read on.

> So the instruction "use nouveau as the driver" does not work on NetBSD.
> 
> How to make use of nouveau module on X11 (pkgsrc) on NetBSD.
> 
> I am on NetBSD 6.0 GENERIC on i386 with pkgsrc x11.

I wrote about this back in February 2010:
http://people.defora.org/~khorben/place/blog/82/Using-xf86-video-nouveau-
on-NetBSD

The situation is simple, and hasn't changed:
- xf86-video-nouveau post-July 2009 requires KMS;
- NetBSD does not have KMS to this day;
- libdrm_nouveau is not enough and requires kernel code too;
- nobody has ported it to NetBSD yet (that I know of)
- I doubt xf86-video-nouveau had any (decent) 3D support at the time
  anyway.

The following video sums it up very well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpOyKCNZYw

I tried porting the old nouveau DRM code to NetBSD about three years ago. 
I ended up doing the sane thing: buying supported hardware from ATI/AMD 
and ditching my NVidia card. I even bought an expensive one because they 
simply deserve it.

HTH,
-- 
khorben