It has been a month of unwavering commitment at Wilcox Technologies. We have created a new sub-focus of the Platform Compatibility Lab, started a new initiative around Linux graphics, and worked with Adelie Linux on their upcoming beta release. Now, I would like to detail some of our more noteworthy achievements:
We have commenced on a large-scale endeavour that we hope to see to completion by the end of next year: significantly increased support for Nvidia graphics cards in the Nouveau project. We want to help the Nouveau project by providing CI and regression testing, issue identification, and when possible, code-level fixes.
To further our impact, we have expanded our Platform Compatibility Lab to include 22 Nvidia GPUs across all generations from Celsius to Ampere inclusive, with the exception of Maxwell which we have been as of yet unable to source.
Additionally, we are in the beginning stages of identifying the work needed to bring Nouveau support for newer generation cards to big endian platforms such as PPC64 and aarch64_be. We have already seen some limited success with Fermi and Kepler and hope to begin upstreaming some of our work with firmware loading soon.
During this flurry of work, we identified an issue in Mesa that could cause a null pointer dereference. We have sent a fix for this issue in a merge request to the Mesa project.
Note that our Nouveau work will, for the time being, be sharing time with other Linux efforts. We cannot work on this full time without sponsorship. If you are interested in sponsoring our Nouveau initiative – or have your own idea for a way we can work together to make a large impact on Libre Software – reach out to us. We listen, and care.
We brought the elfutils package to Adelie Linux to facilitate building of newer Linux kernels for the x86_64 platform. This included adding support for a non-standard variable to the Shimmy getconf implementation.
We worked side-by-side with the Adelie Linux team to significantly improve Wayland support in the Adelie distro. We would like to express our gratitude to all of them, especially Síle and Ermine, for working tirelessly on improving all of Adelie’s graphics packaging.
While working on enabling Wayland support, we contributed the Wayfire compositor to Adelie Linux. This article was written entirely on a laptop running Adelie Linux and Wayfire.
Finally, we worked with the Adelie team to coordinate their release of 1.0-BETA6. We are excited to have been an integral part of the testing and release efforts and look forward to collaborating on many more.
Our continued efforts to make Libre Software the best it can be is only possible with the support of people like you. If you are able, please support us on Patreon or GitHub Sponsors. Together, there is nothing we cannot achieve.
Leave a Reply