REnouveau - Perform tests for open source NVidia drivers development

[manmower]

REnouveau is a tool by which you can help the developers of the free and open source nouveau driver for nvidia cards. Mikos brought this up over at the Arch Linux forum. I encourage everyone with an nvidia GPU to help out!

http://users.tkk.fi/~jpakkane/ren/ has a list of which cards data is still needed from.

jeffc313 has kindly provided a tarball (http://jeff.crowell.googlepages.com/renoveau.tar.gz), eliminating the need to compile it yourself. Thanks!

If the tarball is somehow causing you problems try the instructions in po0f's post on how to compile it yourself.

REnouveau stands for Reverse Engineer nouveau. KoalaBR maintains some (incomplete) documentation. If interest is high enough, it will be folded into CVS. It is an application that runs small opengl tests and watches the changes in the video card registers. Usage instructions are on the README file. It takes some time to get into, but once you know it, it is simple to read. When you run REnouveau, make sure screensaver does not activate, do not wave your mouse over the REnouveau decorationless window and most importantly make sure the whole window is visible all the time. This is used to do clean room reverse engineering (this is not in violation with nvidia driver license). We do not disassemble binaries.

Steps to follow:

1.) Build and/or install renouveau 2.) Make some directory for it, e.g.: mkdir ~/renouveau 3.) Go to this directory: cd ~/renouveau 4.) Run 'renouveau' command 5.) Wait for renouveau OpenGL tests to be finished. Make sure that screensaver is disabled while running tests. Also don't cover test window with mouse cursor (or other windows) and don't move with test window 6.) Create tar.bz2 archive from all output files saved by renouveau in ~/renouveau directory 7.) Send archive to this address: renouveau.dumps@gmail.com

[prizrak]

Link us to a .deb or at least an .rpm please. I got an nVidia and would be more than willing to help.

[Choad]

yeah, or even a few tips on how to compile from cvs. i cant get it to compile :S

[prizrak]

Originally Posted by Choad yeah, or even a few tips on how to compile from cvs. i cant get it to compile :S

That's the problem with Linux for Human Beings everything is so easy we don't even know how to compile from CVS. I done it before but I'm pretty sure it was magic cuz it all worked without a problem. One tip I got for you is make sure you got build-essential(s?) package installed.

[po0f]

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential cvs mesa-common-dev libsdl1.2-dev libxvmc-dev nvidia-glx-dev
$ mkdir ~/src
$ cd ~/src
$ cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@nouveau.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/nouveau co -P renouveau
$ cd renouveau
$ make
$ ./renouveau

Worked for me, I can't be bothered with letting it run for now. I'll let it run later when I'm not using this box.

[manmower]

po0f's instructions should get you there. Also, maybe a mod could edit the topic title so as to attract more attention? I have a feeling this is being overlooked. Compiling and running this should take you about 15 minutes so it really isn't that time consuming.

[bapoumba]

Is title ok with you ?

[manmower]

Excellent, thanks!

[Majlo]

Done. Output files have been sent.

[pay]

How well does this driver perform compared to proprietary nVidia driver and open source radeon driver?