Mailing List Archive

nouveau question
I found a cheap SCSI drive and got my other PWS500a (el segundo) to
work. I put my nVidia card in and made a kernel with a built-in nouveau
driver. The nouveau framebuffer console works fine.
Gentoo refuses to acknowledge VIDEO_CARDS="nouveau" on my alpha. I see
how USE flags can be masked in profiles, but I don't know how video
cards are masked. I'm sure someone could tell me quicker than I can
figure it out myself.

Is nouveau being prevented because alpha can't run it?
Am I missing some obvious answer?

Adios, DW
Re: nouveau question -follow up [ In reply to ]
>I don't know how video cards are masked. I'm sure someone could tell
me quicker than I can figure it out myself.

I was looking in the wrong use.mask file. I found it.
Nouveau was masked 4 years ago because it needs testing. So, I'll just
unmask it and see what happens.

One more question... for newer cards than mine, nouveau requires
firmware blobs for some acceleration. Are those blobs independent of
the computer, or do they require an intel/amd cpu? The Gentoo nvidia
firmware package only shows amd64 and i386, I think.

Adios, DW
Re: nouveau question -follow up [ In reply to ]
Don Wilburn wrote:
> >I don't know how video cards are masked. I'm sure someone could tell
> me quicker than I can figure it out myself.
>
> I was looking in the wrong use.mask file. I found it.
> Nouveau was masked 4 years ago because it needs testing. So, I'll
> just unmask it and see what happens.
>
> One more question... for newer cards than mine, nouveau requires
> firmware blobs for some acceleration. Are those blobs independent of
> the computer, or do they require an intel/amd cpu? The Gentoo nvidia
> firmware package only shows amd64 and i386, I think.
>
> Adios, DW
>
>

The firmware should be independent of the architecture. Looking at the
ebuild, it looks like it downloads the x86 driver from nvidia, extracts
the files and then runs a python script to pull the firmware blob from
the driver. Eventually, it ends up in /lib/firmware/nouveau. Worst case
scenario you'll have to extract it on a x86 box (or maybe under qemu
running linux...) and copy the resulting file manually back to the Alpha.

Alan