The X11 overlay provides live and bleeding edge ebuilds for X11 stuff and graphics card drivers (ATI and Intel). If you own a Nvidia card, you need to use the Nouveau overlay to get the Nouveau driver. Moreover, both overlays provide some similar ebuilds : x11-drm, libdrm, mesa etc ... That's why i think that merging both overlays would make things easier : only one overlay would be required to get live X11 stuff! The Nouveau driver is going to be the default Nvidia driver in the next Fedora release : the Nouveau driver is getting better and better! So, it would be nice to have this good driver in our X11 overlay. :) Reproducible: Always
There are already nouveau patches in bugzilla, one of us just needs to sit down and apply them to the x11 overlay. Could you review them, compare them to what you have in the Nouveau overlay? Thanks :)
Before doing any test with patches or ebuilds from bugzilla, i was already using libdrm, mesa and dri2proto from the X11 overlay. Only x11-drm and xf86-video-nouveau came from the Nouveau overlay. I applied two patchs (http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=259503 and http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=255647) on the x11-drm ebuild (X11 overlay) and it compiled without problem. For xf86-video-nouveau, i took the ebuild for Intel drivers and modified it to make it work. In other words, I renamed every things refering to Intel and added the Nouveau git server url. I was using libdrm from the X11 overlay without patching it ... and it worked. :D Anyway, i patched it with this patch (http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=259501). I can say that everything compiled correctly and X is still working :D So these patches seem good. :D Thank you for taking care of this bug. ;)
Could you CC some of the people who work on the nouveau overlay? It would definitely be good to get them involved in this discussion.
You're right, i don't know why i didn't do this earlier. :s I've just CCed Pekka Paalanen, who seems to maintain the Nouveau overlay. ;)
Both bug #259503 and bug #255647 definitely need to be fixed as well. Did you guys fix those in the Nouveau overlay? Thanks
For both bugs, you just have to apply the patches, which are attached to each bug report. ;) This is what i did, and that seems to work. :)
Not in the second bug I linked, the patch doesn't apply. And I'm a bit worried as the -9999 and the snapshot ebuilds are drifting further apart. We should definitely try to keep the changes to a minimum. Would anyone care to dive into this as well? Thanks
If someone wants to pull all the good stuff from the Nouveau overlay to x11 overlay, be my guest. I agree, it would be nice to have it all in x11. OTOH, I do not want commit access to x11, even if someone would offer it. The Nouveau overlay has been convenient for me, since I use it, and I can fix it whenever it breaks for me. With x11, won't care that much, but I might post a patch personally to a maintainer, if I ever fixed something. x11-drm and libdrm in nouveau vs. x11 overlays has been a bit of a nuisance, but I spent a lot of effort a long time ago to clean those two ebuilds, especially not building drmstat, dristat in x11-drm, which was just braindead (not to mention the use of linux-core/Makefile for them). Something has creeped back into x11-drm ebuild, since it nowadays runs autoconf again. I'm not sure what dristat, drmstat are for, but I strongly suspect the sanity of packaging them separate from libdrm. Anyway, the nouveau overlay contains fully functional (well, for Nouveau) ebuilds for x11-drm, libdrm anf xf86-video-nouveau. If those are ported to x11 overlay, I could practically forget about the nouveau overlay. The ChangeLogs should be good, in case you wonder about the history. The ebuilds may still contain some historical cruft, but I actively use them and they work. You probably want to make --enable-nouveau-experimental-api in libdrm conditional to VIDEO_CARDS="nouveau". Do *not* port mesa or mmio-trace ebuilds. And please do not add Gallium3D/Nouveau support to the x11 mesa ebuild, unless you make the users swear they will not come to ask for help from the Nouveau devels. Only end users use the mesa ebuild, and end users cannot yet offer any help. I will not help with Mesa ebuilds until Nouveau starts accepting Gallium3d bug reports. So I guess my bottom line is: do as you wish, all the info is in the nouveau overlay. If you do it well, we might ditch the nouveau overlay completely. You guys hopefully know the Gentoo ebuild system better than I do. You can always ask me or someone else, if something is not building right, but as long as the nouveau overlay ebuilds work, I suggest studying them and the ChangeLogs. Cheers.
I presently maintain xf86-video-nouveau together with the nouveau parts split from libdrm and x11-drm in the sunrise overlay for bug 253705. I found a Gentoo developer who was willing to proxy-maintain this for me in the tree, but as the X developers were not comfortable with that the ebuilds are now living in sunrise. Adding a video_cards_nouveau use flag to libdrm I proposed in bug 260234 but it was rejected. Building with --enable-nouveau-experimental-api will fail for libdrm-2.4.5 anyway, an additional patch is required. http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/sunrise/browser/sunrise/x11-libs/libdrm_nouveau/files/libdrm-2.4.5-nouveau.patch The dristat/drmstat problem is a separate issue, I suggest not conflating it with nouveau.
I would advice against doing any snapshot ebuilds supporting Nouveau (e.g. libdrm-2.4.5?) until Nouveau is actually released. Snapshot or fixed version ebuilds do not help anyone: users get outdated software that is not even stable, and developers do not get their latest code tested. If you are concerned that the git master HEAD revision is sometimes broken, the problems should be reported upstream for libdrm (and libdrm_nouveau) and xf86-video-nouveau. And if a user is looking for stability, it is too early for him to be using Nouveau anyway. Are there any other reasons why you would like to do snapshot ebuilds?
I think it'd be a good first step to have working git ebuilds for nouveau. I've already merged a patch for libdrm-9999, I'll gladly merge more if they are sent our way :) We can always revisit snapshot ebuilds later on. Thanks
Live only ebuilds are not very welcome in the tree. If you do snapshots, you can check whether they actually work or not before unleashing them onto users. An elog message could be displayed that tells users to build git master before reporting problems. And if the snapshots are taken frequently enough, users won't get outdated software. For libdrm_nouveau you can stay with the release for now as it does not change often. I have received feedback from several users of the git live and snapshot ebuilds in sunrise and they report them to work.
(In reply to comment #12) > Live only ebuilds are not very welcome in the tree. Indeed, but we're talking about the x11 overlay. Portage is a whole other issue. > An elog message could be displayed that tells users to build git master before > reporting problems. And if the snapshots are taken frequently enough, users > won't get outdated software. For libdrm_nouveau you can stay with the release > for now as it does not change often. > > I have received feedback from several users of the git live and snapshot > ebuilds in sunrise and they report them to work. Then let's try to merge the live ebuilds. That's what this discussion is about. We can come up with plans for snapshots later on. Thanks
(In reply to comment #12) > Live only ebuilds are not very welcome in the tree. If you do snapshots, you Which tree? You are not considering to push Nouveau to Portage, are you? Please, do not, until Nouveau is released. Otherwise you personally get to deal with all the breakage. Not to mention, that I suspect people pouring to the Nouveau irc channel asking silly questions, because they don't get the elog messages. > can check whether they actually work or not before unleashing them onto users. Do you really plan to do this yourself? How many different Nvidia cards do you have? > An elog message could be displayed that tells users to build git master before > reporting problems. And if the snapshots are taken frequently enough, users > won't get outdated software. For libdrm_nouveau you can stay with the release > for now as it does not change often. Having an ebuild telling users they should go and fetch, compile and install by hand sounds quite contrary to the idea of an ebuild. We can have live ebuilds, let's use the ebuild magic for us. Are you volunteering to do all the daily snapshots? That is a very high maintenance cost. My comments here are to minimize the work you need to put in. The live ebuilds have been very low-maintenance. Some people may actually think they are abandoned, since most of the time they don't need any updates. > I have received feedback from several users of the git live and snapshot > ebuilds in sunrise and they report them to work. Nice to hear that works. What is the difference between sunrise and x11, why have the stuff in both? btw. let me know when all three libdrm/x11-drm/xf86-video-nouveau live ebuilds are in x11. I'm interested in testing them.
Let's focus on the x11 overlay and live nouveau ebuilds. Nothing else in _this_ bug. Thanks
(In reply to comment #14) Sunrise has similar policy as the official tree. Which may be different from the X11 overlay's policy. Note that Fedora is going to ship some snapshot of nouveau as the default. Nowhere I suggested that users shall compile something by hand. It is perfectly possible to have both snapshot and live git ebuilds, the difference is only one line (EGIT_TREE; two if you count KEYWORDS). > What is the difference between sunrise and x11, why have the stuff in both? Sunrise is the Gentoo overlay for user-maintained packages. X11 is the overlay from the Gentoo X11 developers. They target different audiences.
(In reply to comment #16) > Sunrise is the Gentoo overlay for user-maintained packages. X11 is the overlay > from the Gentoo X11 developers. They target different audiences. Frankly, we're pretty happy to give x11-overlay access to anyone competent.
I would say that we have nouveau support in x11 overlay now for: mesa, drm, libdrm in live versions. so only thing that remains to be done for live is the nouveau driver itself :]
Well, we have all pieces in the overlay, and soon Chi-Thahn will have overlay access to fix nouveau bugs ;) Closing
