It was good of Phoronix to clarify their story implying that Nouveau, the open source driver for NVidia graphic cards, was somehow dead or dormant. One thing that had me scratching my head, though — isn’t this open source, guys? I mean, you could just look at the source to see what’s going on. This log sure doesn’t look dead to me! ? I hope that other Internet news reporters will take this lesson to heart and check facts underlying their stories. Hard-hitting news is thoroughly appreciated, but needs to be backed up by solid reporting.
By the way, I have an NVidia video card in my Dell XPS M1330 laptop, and I’m running the pre-F12 version of Rawhide on it. And I can definitely report that the progress between Fedora 11 and Fedora 12 on the Nouveau driver is astonishing! I now have reliable suspend/resume and hibernate/thaw, which was a problem in prior releases.So I know that Fedora 12 “Constantine” stands to be a great release from the perspective of a lot of NVidia users.
There’s still a rough spot or two that I know Ben and the other fabulous Nouveau developers are still hard at work polishing in the current feature set — not to mention the work they’re doing to make the driver even better in future releases. The nature of open source is to be constantly changing and improving, and Nouveau is a great example of how that methodology has yielded great results in a relatively short amount of time.
This is one dog that is not only still in the hunt, but gaining fast. Nice work, Nouveau guys!