Howto: KMS on Nvidia hardware.

Question

The Fedora 11 Beta has it, so why cant we?  Well you can too, and it's not very hard either! I have to warn you though, I am unable to get Xorg to run while modesetting is enabled,  My card is an 8400M GS, but you may have more luck than me,
The basic idea is that you just need to modify the nouveau-drm package to pull from the "modesetting-gem" git branch rather than master.  The reason this is not already done is, of course, because of the Arch Way.  Once modesetting gets merged into the master branch, this will no longer be necessary.
Step 1: Get the stock PKGBUILD 'n stuff.  The fastest way is to just use abs:
abs extra/nouveau-drm
cp /var/abs/extra/nouveau-drm -r .
Step 2: Modify PKGBUILD.  You can use the one provided here or just modify the stock one.  The main (actually, only) differences are that the pre-made arch linux source tarball isn't needed and instead we pull the source directly from the freedesktop.org drm git repository, and then checkout the modesetting-gem branch. The PKGBUILD provided could be better, but it works well enough.
pkgname=nouveau-drm
pkgver=20090528
_gitdate=20090528
pkgrel=1
pkgdesc="nvidia opensource X driver"
arch=('i686' 'x86_64')
url="http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/"
makedepends=('git' 'autoconf' 'pkgconfig')
depends=("kernel26>=2.6.29" "kernel26<2.6.30" 'udev>=141' 'cairo')
install=${pkgname}.install
license=('GPL')
source=(dont_check_for_pthread.patch)
md5sums=('237f3cdb1bfc5c62bfa7b038b7a20b2a')
build() {
# get git code
cd ${srcdir}
git clone -v git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/mesa/drm/
cd drm
git checkout --track origin/modesetting-gem
# git archive --prefix=mesa-drm-${_gitdate}/ --format=tar HEAD | bzip2 > ../../mesa-drm-${_gitdate}.tar.bz2
# return 1
# build the drm kernel module
# make sure the system kernel doesn't have "drm" set to "yes",
# default Arch kernel26 has it as module drm.ko, make sure it's not loaded
# cd ${srcdir}/mesa-drm-${_gitdate}
patch -Np0 -i ${srcdir}/dont_check_for_pthread.patch || return 1
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr # --enable-udev --disable-option-checking
cd linux-core
make DRM_MODULES="nouveau" || return 1
install -D -m 0644 drm.ko ${pkgdir}/lib/modules/`uname -r`/updates/drm.ko || return 1
install -D -m 0644 nouveau.ko ${pkgdir}/lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/video/nouveau.ko || return 1
install -D -m 0644 ../shared-core/nouveau_drm.h ${pkgdir}/usr/include/nouveau_drm.h || return 1
Step 3: Build, Install, and Insert.  This new kernel module now has the modeset parameter, just like the Intel module, Yay!  And you should make sure to unload any nvidia or other video drivers using the card before attempting to modprobe the nouveau kernel module in order to avoid very bad things.
makepkg -s
pacman -U nouveau-drm-*.pkg.tar.gz
modprobe nouveau modeset=1
As soon as you insert the new modesetting module, your console resolution will switch to the native resolution of your display and you are all ready to go!  Adding the new module to your initrd or grub entry should roughly follow the same steps as with the intel drivers.
Last edited by Odysseus (2009-05-29 04:29:09)

Answer 1

maybe i'm just too lazy to see the problem, but when i use the PKGBUILD you posted above, i get:
Branch modesetting-gem set up to track remote branch modesetting-gem from origin.
Switched to a new branch 'modesetting-gem'                                       
can't find file to patch at input line 4                                         
Perhaps you used the wrong -p or --strip option?                                 
The text leading up to this was:                                                 
|diff -ru libdrm-2.4.0/configure.ac libdrm-2.4.0-nostubs/configure.ac           
|--- libdrm-2.4.0/configure.ac  2008-10-09 21:57:09.000000000 +0200             
|+++ libdrm-2.4.0-nostubs/configure.ac  2008-10-21 10:48:24.000000000 +0200     
File to patch: