A few weeks back I made a post about switching back to the open-source nouveau drivers for my Nvidia graphics card. The main upside was that the suspend and hibernate functionality now worked - something that did not happen with the binary drivers from Nvidia. This is a concern for me, since I now have a Home Theatre PC running continuously and I would like to make some power savings with my main computer.
After running for a few weeks, here are some things I have noticed:
Artifacts on screen after coming out of suspend. They usually take the form of a vertical line of red pixels, spaced apart. They disappear after a reboot, so it is not permanent, but it is mildly annoying.
OpenGL performance much reduced. I was able to bring some of it back by installing libgl1-mesa-dri-experimental, found in the Ubuntu repositories. They bring a few extra modules for using OpenGL, and allows programs like Google Earth to run again (more about this next). The modules in the repository are a fairly early build - people have had more success using current-build versions of the Gallium3D driver. I haven't tried them yet, not sure if I will.
Google Earth problems. In linux, Google Earth makes use of OpenGL to draw its graphics on screen. The implementation in the binary Nvidia drivers is quite good, in the open-source drivers it is lagging behind somewhat. Before installing libgl1-mesa-dri-experimental, Google Earth would not run at all, simply putting up a message box asking you to update your drivers. After installing, it now runs, albeit slowly.
I'm still in two minds about whether to keep these drivers or go back to the binary versions. I'll probably see how things go for a while - how much I make use of suspend (which is sooo much quicker to resume from than booting from scratch - the AHCI manager takes forever to read the drives in the BIOS) will probably determine things. It might even be worth trying an ATI card to see how the drivers are with that. I'm quite impressed by the open source radeon drivers in my laptop. I don't really use my desktop now for MythTV since building the HTPC, so VDPAU performance isn't so much a priority.
I'll update in time, whenever a decision is made.
Showing posts with label nouveau. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nouveau. Show all posts
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Friday, January 7, 2011
Switched back to nouveau graphics driver - suspend now works!
As part of the process of building the separate MythTV box (as seen in my last few posts), I no longer needed the VDPAU acceleration for TV playback on my main PC. I also wanted to see if the suspend and hibernate functionality worked with the open source nvidia drivers (nouveau), as opposed to the proprietary binary ones. Booting the system with an Ubuntu live CD, which uses the nouveau drivers by default, let me suspend the computer and resume correctly - something it did not do with nvidia's binary drivers.
So under System -> Administration -> Additional Drivers, I disabled the proprietary drivers, which re-installed the nouveau driver. Rebooting, the screen came back up, but only one of them (I have two), and at the wrong resolution. The cause of this was a fix I had applied earlier to make the boot screen look right with the Nvidia drivers, as described at the end of this earlier post. Once I removed the extra text from the grub boot command, everything worked fine. Suspend and hibernate both worked, although I found hibernate to be a little pointless - it took about the same length of time as a normal boot.
The only downside was the compiz desktop effects no longer worked, although I believe if you use a more current version of the nouveau drivers it may do so. 3D performance is nowhere near what the binary drivers provide either, but that isn't so much of an issue since I dual boot with windows. Games can be played there.
So under System -> Administration -> Additional Drivers, I disabled the proprietary drivers, which re-installed the nouveau driver. Rebooting, the screen came back up, but only one of them (I have two), and at the wrong resolution. The cause of this was a fix I had applied earlier to make the boot screen look right with the Nvidia drivers, as described at the end of this earlier post. Once I removed the extra text from the grub boot command, everything worked fine. Suspend and hibernate both worked, although I found hibernate to be a little pointless - it took about the same length of time as a normal boot.
The only downside was the compiz desktop effects no longer worked, although I believe if you use a more current version of the nouveau drivers it may do so. 3D performance is nowhere near what the binary drivers provide either, but that isn't so much of an issue since I dual boot with windows. Games can be played there.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Upgrade to Maverick Meerkat - version 10.10 worked!
I am writing this from my newly-upgraded Ubuntu 10.10 system! This has been the second time I upgraded the installation, rather than start afresh. I was a little nervous, to be honest, but backups were made before the upgrade so there was an escape plan.
There were only a few issues that were pretty easily fixed, and I may, just may, have fixed the hanging on boot problem I had with version 10.04.
One problem I had was the Hard drive temperature reporting in Conky - it stopped displaying a temperature. This was because the hddtemp command could only be run as root - Conky doesn't run with those privileges, and I didn't want to start doing so. A quick search revealed a single line command to allow hddtemp to be run as a regular user:
After doing that, the disk temperature re-appeared and all was good.
Fixing the boot screen
This was a problem that I had in the previous version, 10.04, as well as in 10.10. It is to do with running the Nvidia proprietary drivers, and switching to different video modes. Basically, there are some steps to try at this site, which I did. It involves setting some video modes in the boot loader. I initially tried 1680x1050 (about the best that was supported by my card, even though it runs at 1920x1080 once at the desktop) and got a comically large ubuntu logo during boot. A later change to 1280x1024 yielded a much better result.
So far, the boot and shutdown screens look much better, and I haven't yet had it hang on me. I am hesitant to call it truly fixed until a few more weeks have passed.
Edit January 7, 2011: If you do these changes and then switch back to the open source driver (nouveau), you have to undo the changes to be able to set the proper resolution for your screen(s).
There were only a few issues that were pretty easily fixed, and I may, just may, have fixed the hanging on boot problem I had with version 10.04.
One problem I had was the Hard drive temperature reporting in Conky - it stopped displaying a temperature. This was because the hddtemp command could only be run as root - Conky doesn't run with those privileges, and I didn't want to start doing so. A quick search revealed a single line command to allow hddtemp to be run as a regular user:
sudo chmod u+s /usr/sbin/hddtemp
After doing that, the disk temperature re-appeared and all was good.
Fixing the boot screen
This was a problem that I had in the previous version, 10.04, as well as in 10.10. It is to do with running the Nvidia proprietary drivers, and switching to different video modes. Basically, there are some steps to try at this site, which I did. It involves setting some video modes in the boot loader. I initially tried 1680x1050 (about the best that was supported by my card, even though it runs at 1920x1080 once at the desktop) and got a comically large ubuntu logo during boot. A later change to 1280x1024 yielded a much better result.
So far, the boot and shutdown screens look much better, and I haven't yet had it hang on me. I am hesitant to call it truly fixed until a few more weeks have passed.
Edit January 7, 2011: If you do these changes and then switch back to the open source driver (nouveau), you have to undo the changes to be able to set the proper resolution for your screen(s).
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