The Real Need For Nouveau Power Management

“We have already published a look at the Fedora 13 Beta,
delivered ATI Radeon benchmarks atop Fedora 13 Beta, and have other
articles on the way covering this new Fedora release, while in this
article we are investigating Nouveau’s power performance using this
newest Fedora release. If you are a mobile user planning to use the
Nouveau stack right now, or you care the least bit about energy
savings with your desktop, its power consumption alone may rule
this open-source driver out as even a current possibility.

“Fedora has always been at the forefront of pulling in the
latest Nouveau driver code as it was first to ditch the
xf86-video-nv driver in favor of this community-driven effort.
Fedora began by shipping user-space mode-setting support with the
Nouveau DDX, and then moved over to providing NVIDIA kernel
mode-setting support, and now with Fedora 13 there is even the
Nouveau Gallium3D driver available. This all while the Nouveau DRM
only entered the mainline Linux kernel a few months back and just
now with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and other distributions are they
beginning to utilize the Nouveau kernel mode-setting capabilities.
It will likely be some months still before the Gallium3D Nouveau
driver (and its classic Mesa driver for old NVIDIA ASICs) is picked
up by other distributions, but Fedora tends to live on the edge of
the open-source Linux graphics stack and Red Hat also happens to
employ one of the Nouveau developers (Ben Skeggs) and David Airlie
is also involved with the open-source NVIDIA work.”

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