About Using "nVidia Open Source Driver" on MIPS Computer

About Using "nVidia Open Source Driver" on MIPS Computer

[Rebecca N. Palmer]

Debian have been building nouveau on a wide range of CPUs, including 
mips (big-endian) and mipsel (little-endian, includes Loongson), for 
some time; however, this does not necessarily mean anyone has actually 
tried to use it.

https://packages.debian.org/sid/linux-image-3.14-1-4kc-malta
https://packages.debian.org/sid/libdrm-nouveau2
https://packages.debian.org/sid/xserver-xorg-video-nouveau
https://packages.debian.org/sid/libgl1-mesa-dri

About Using "nVidia Open Source Driver" on MIPS Computer

[Zhiqiang Liu]

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Hello, Gurus, recently I got a MIPS computer installed with Linux
OS(Fedora), unfortunately there is no driver for the graphics
card, so it cannot perform 3D acceleration. Since I happen to have a nVidia
graphics card at hand (it is GeForce 9500GT, somewhat old), I want to apply
this card on this computer, so my questions are:

1. Is it possible to make a nVidia graphics driver for this MIPS computer
from current open source driver, i.e, transplant current
X86-based driver to MIPs-based driver?
2. If it is possible to do so, then what and where should I start with? what
parts of the driver I'll have to modify? and are there any
architecture-specific
parts, e.g, parts implemented by X86 assembly language or something else HW
dependent?
3. What skills do you think I must have to do this job? I am skillful at C
programming in Linux, and have much experience on HW designing, should I
grasp OpenGL for this work?
4. To make a workable driver with 3D acceleration, which modules' source codes
should I download? I have downloaded a file named
"xf86-video-nouveau-1.0.10.zip", is it right?

Currently I don't have so much knowledge on Graphics Card and Linux, but I
am interested in this task very much, I will try my best to finish it as
long as there are possibilities to succeed.

Thank your gurus very much!

Best Regards
Gavin

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Re: About Using "nVidia Open Source Driver" on MIPS Computer

[Ilia Mirkin]

On Tue, May 20, 2014 at 10:33 AM, Zhiqiang Liu <gavin.liuzq-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Hello, Gurus, recently I got a MIPS computer installed with Linux
> OS(Fedora), unfortunately there is no driver for the graphics
> card, so it cannot perform 3D acceleration. Since I happen to have a nVidia
> graphics card at hand (it is GeForce 9500GT, somewhat old), I want to apply
> this card on this computer, so my questions are:
>
> 1. Is it possible to make a nVidia graphics driver for this MIPS computer
> from current open source driver, i.e, transplant current
> X86-based driver to MIPs-based driver?

What about the current driver is x86-based? nouveau works on ppc,
should also work on mips. I'm sure there will be issues, anything
outside of x86 doesn't get a huge amount of testing...

> 2. If it is possible to do so, then what and where should I start with? what
> parts of the driver I'll have to modify? and are there any
> architecture-specific parts, e.g, parts implemented by X86 assembly language
> or something else HW dependent?

Plug it in and see if it works :) It probably won't, but it'll be
interesting to see where the failures happen. If possible, configure
your kernel for 4K pages -- non-4K page size has been an area with
problems in the past.

> 3. What skills do you think I must have to do this job? I am skillful at C
> programming in Linux, and have much experience on HW designing, should I
> grasp OpenGL for this work?
> 4. To make a workable driver with 3D acceleration, which modules' source
> codes should I download? I have downloaded a file named
> "xf86-video-nouveau-1.0.10.zip", is it right?

Nouveau is made up of several parts. First, it is a KMS driver in the
linux kernel (the module would be called 'nouveau'). If that doesn't
work, you won't be able to use any of the other pieces. Then there is
the user-space stack, which is the DDX for Xorg (xf86-video-nouveau)
and the 3D driver, which is part of mesa. Take a look at
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/InstallNouveau/ if you plan on
building from source and don't have a lot of experience doing so.
There is nothing x86-specific in any of these bits (sure, there are a
couple of SSE2-based optimizations in the ddx and mesa drivers,
relating to video stuff, but they're completely optional and should
fall back on non-sse versions if sse isn't available).

Good luck,

  -ilia