No hardware acceleration with Xorg/nouveau and a solution

[MickeyK]

Hi all and thanks for Gentoo!

A long story short: With a new monitor came the need for "better" graphics hardware. So I chose an Nvidia Geforce GT710 based one b/c it's cheap and passive and I had a PCIEX16 slot free.

BUT ... after closely following the Xorg/nouveau instructions for gentoo and several kernel and package rebuilds later I still could not get hardware acceleration enabled. NB: kernel mode setting worked but in KDE the graphics renderer was s/w based (llvmpipe).

As a last resort I booted ubuntu and kubuntu and both had hw accelration with Xorg out of the box.

I then compared the Xorg logs and found that Xorg on ubuntu loaded the modesetting display driver whereas the gentoo Xorg build loaded nouveau before modesetting and this was the problem. NB: there were no special files in /etc/X11/xorg.config.d!

The solution for me was to add a file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/00nouveau.conf with

Code: Select all

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "nouveau"
    Driver      "modesetting"
EndSection

With this I immediately got hw acceleration:

~ $ glxinfo -B
name of display: :0
display: :0 screen: 0
direct rendering: Yes
Extended renderer info (GLX_MESA_query_renderer):
Vendor: Mesa (0x10de)
Device: NV106 (0x128b)
Version: 25.2.8
Accelerated: yes
Video memory: 2016MB
Unified memory: no
Preferred profile: core (0x1)
Max core profile version: 4.3
Max compat profile version: 4.3
Max GLES1 profile version: 1.1
Max GLES[23] profile version: 3.2
Memory info (GL_ATI_meminfo):
VBO free memory - total: 1612 MB, largest block: 1612 MB
VBO free aux. memory - total: 838859 MB, largest block: 838859 MB
Texture free memory - total: 1612 MB, largest block: 1612 MB
Texture free aux. memory - total: 838859 MB, largest block: 838859 MB
Renderbuffer free memory - total: 1612 MB, largest block: 1612 MB
Renderbuffer free aux. memory - total: 838859 MB, largest block: 838859 MB
Memory info (GL_NVX_gpu_memory_info):
Dedicated video memory: 2016 MB
Total available memory: 1050591 MB
Currently available dedicated video memory: 1612 MB
OpenGL vendor string: Mesa
OpenGL renderer string: NV106
OpenGL core profile version string: 4.3 (Core Profile) Mesa 25.2.8
OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 4.30
OpenGL core profile context flags: (none)
OpenGL core profile profile mask: core profile

OpenGL version string: 4.3 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 25.2.8
OpenGL shading language version string: 4.30
OpenGL context flags: (none)
OpenGL profile mask: compatibility profile

OpenGL ES profile version string: OpenGL ES 3.2 Mesa 25.2.8
OpenGL ES profile shading language version string: OpenGL ES GLSL ES 3.20

What I do not understand is why Xorg on gentoo loads the nouveau driver before the modesetting driver. I suspect it is built differently for ubuntu.

Thanks and best regards!

[netfab]

Hi,

Maybe you should add this information directly on the wiki, else I'm afraid that it will be lost in the abysses of this forum.
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Xorg/Hardw ... tion_guide
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Nouveau

[grknight]

What I do not understand is why Xorg on gentoo loads the nouveau driver before the modesetting driver. I suspect it is built differently for ubuntu.

Hardware specific drivers are preferred over modesetting in Xorg's automatic configuation. (because it is generally beneficial in most cases)

If x11-drivers/xf86-video-nouveau is not installed, then it would fall back to modesetting automatically.

[lostpaperclips]

I just wanted to chime in and say that this xorg.conf excerpt solved my problem nouveau & 3D acceleration with my NVidia GeForce GTX 745 (GM107 from the Maxwell chip family).

I had previously been using the nvidia-drivers but this hardware support got dropped with >=x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-581 and I needed to switch to nouveau. Without this change to the xorg.conf file, I did not have any 3D acceleration.