Ubuntu 10.04 Is Getting Nouveau DRM

Nouveau would be pulled into Ubuntu 10.04 as the default NVIDIA graphics driver replacing the current open-source NVIDIA driver.
What is Nouveau?

The nouveau project aims to build high-quality, open source drivers for nVidia cards.


The Nouveau driver stack isn't stable or officially released yet, but the 2D portion is in good standing and the 3D portion written to use Gallium3D is progressing (recent status update). The Nouveau driver has been used by default in two Fedora releases, but on the Ubuntu side it will be the default starting with Ubuntu 10.04

A meeting was held today on IRC regarding Nouveau in Ubuntu's kernel. In particular, with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS planning to ship with the Linux 2.6.32 kernel, which has no support for Nouveau, it's to be decided what DRM code to back-port into this Ubuntu kernel. The entire drm-next tree (the DRM code that will appear in Linux 2.6.33) could be pulled in, but that's risking more regressions and other graphics updates outside of the Nouveau driver (though we would love for this pull to happen!), or to just manually pull in the Nouveau-specific patches. This specific matter is to be discussed more at tomorrow's Ubuntu kernel meeting. The drm-next patch-set weighs in at about 2.9 megabytes of code.

Nouveau DRM code may be added to Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 1 or later release of Ubuntu 10.04.