Re: [gentoo-user] is anyone using Nouveau graphics driver ?

[Davyd McColl]

For what it's worth, my experience with Nouveau has been dismal.

I use KDE plasma, which runs everything via accelerated graphics and I 
would encounter system-wide lockups within 2 hours, often much closer to 
within 10 minutes.
Nouveau has better terminal support though, supporting the higher 
resolutions that the proprietary driver can't be bothered to support. So if 
you have a vt-only use-case, it's a win. But otherwise, I'm very wary.
Granted, the last time I tried was about a year ago, but the troubles I had 
been experiencing were common with other users for long before that.

You could give it a try and see.

As for usage, iirc, if it's enabled in your kernel config, it's loaded by 
default, even if the proprietary drivers are installed. I blacklisted the 
Nouveau module to get the proprietary one loaded (so that I could switch 
back after a kernel update to see if it worked properly then). Again, 
things may have changed from when I last tried, but I think you should be 
able to enable, build and reboot to have it loaded already (obviously, you 
could rmmod and modprobe if the idea of a reboot doesn't sit well)

-d


On July 23, 2018 12:17:53 Philip Webb <purslow@××××××××.net> wrote:

> Among my efforts to get scanning working again with Gentoo,
> I've encountered another problem in a different area.
> Recently, I sent a message to this list re Nvidia-drivers
> -- that 396.24-r1 wouldn't start with my 4.14.52 kernel,
> so I started using 390.67 -- & I've now discovered that there's a problem
> with any version of Nvidia & my previous 4.9.16 & 4.2.0-r1 kernels.
>
> Might I be better off, if I used Nouveau instead ?
> It is what Mint 17 & 19 seem to use, so must be fairly stable.
> So a few questions :
>
> (1) What are people's experiences with Nouveau ?
>     -- does it work easily with various kernels ?
>     -- does it manage graphics stably & reliably ?
>     -- I don't do much with video (a few newsreels) & don't use sound.
>
> (2) If I install it, how do I switch between Nouveau & Nvidia ?
>
> (3) Sadly, I didn't make a Quickpkg of the Nvidia version I was using
> when my scanner was working with Gentoo (last time 180626).
> I have the distfiles, but not the ebuilds :
> is there anywhere I can find ebuilds for Nvidia-Drivers 390.42 390.48 ?
>
> --
> ========================,,============================================
> SUPPORT     ___________//___,   Philip Webb
> ELECTRIC   /] [] [] [] [] []|   Cities Centre, University of Toronto
> TRANSIT    `-O----------O---'   purslowatchassdotutorontodotca
>
>