Fix Video Acceleration in Nouveau (linux)

[@leonbishop7404]

is this only for specific (older?) GPU's? i have gt 720 with mesa gallium 20.3.5, downloaded nvidia driver NVIDIA-Linux-x86-340.108 and did "extract_firmware" and copy it to respective folder, but i'm getting a bunch of errors and green artifacts when watching video in mpv with vaapi. am i missing some packages like mesa-vdpau-drivers libvdpau1 libnvcuvid1 nvidia-driver mesa-va-drivers etc? or maybe it has something to do with the fact that the driver is x86 and my system is x64? vainfo does return a list of codecs and reports no errors

[@rad_linux]

Interesting! was vainfo returning the proper codecs before you made the firmware fix? I also do believe that the gt 720 works with the 390 legacy drivers so I'm not sure that the 340 fix is right for that card. If you are getting errors with vainfo before doing the fix, then its possible you might be able to do something similar with the 390 drivers instead of the 340 drivers.

[@leonbishop7404]

​@@rad_linux will try to rename /lib/firmware/nouveau folder and check vainfo output. also, extract_firmware script has a list of valid folder(same as driver) names in range from some 319 drivers up to 340.108 one, so i'm not sure if 390 driver will work(I was optimistic enough to try the script with the latest 470.129 driver, obviously didnt work lol). maybe if you rename folder to some other allowed version before extracting... also i saw some thread on aur page of nouveau-fw package, where ako user mentions the fact that these x32 blobs are almost a decade old so it makes me believe that they're using this script too and it might indeed be only for these old driver versions(as script suggests to check source code for acceptable versions)

[@leonbishop7404]

@@rad_linux nope I renamed the /lib/firmware/nouveau, reboot, and it doesnt return proper codecs(doesnt return errors either)... will try 390 drivers if nothing works

[@leonbishop7404]

ok, so there's an open issue on extract_firmware github page, where one of the maintainers replied that this script is not supposed to work with versions above the 340.108 one

[@macflav75]

This is very interesting. Apparently it "unlocked" some features for me, using the old 340xx legacy run file (~15 year-old card). Unfortunately, it doesn't fix the random system freeze issue that I've never been able to solve with nouveau. Linux only works for me with the proprietary driver, which is not supported anymore, and not so straight-forward to use with newer kernels. It's a shame that my old laptop works so well with Windows 10 out of the box, and not with Linux.

[@rad_linux]

nouveau is will get better in time and there have been big advancements in the last couple years. Unfortunately reverse engineering a driver that works with so many cards is very difficult. Hopefully this issue will not persist in future generations as Nvidia open sources its drivers for newer cards.

[@macflav75]

@@rad_linux Funny how they open source newer drivers, but not older ones. I'd expect it to be the other way around. With the upcoming end of life for Windows 10, this would be perfect timing to migrate old PCs to Linux.