Nouveau (graphics)
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- The correct title of this article is nouveau (graphics). The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.
In computing, nouveau is an X.Org Foundation and Freedesktop.org project aiming to develop free software drivers for NVIDIA graphics cards, by reverse engineering NVIDIA's current proprietary drivers for Linux. Its DRI X.org module gets loaded by Mesa 3D. nouveau is under the MIT license.
The project uses several homebrew programs for its reverse engineering, such as mmio-trace and renouveau.
renouveau stands for most of the reverse engineering work. Users with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers run it on their computers. It works by copying the current graphics card MMIO register space, drawing some graphics and taking another copy of the MMIO, and outputting the difference to a text file. It runs slightly over 70 different tests which the user of the computer then makes a tar.bz2 archive of and sends to renouveau.dumps@gmail.com, after which it is automatically transferred to the project's FTP servers for the developers to analyze. renouveau is licensed under the GPL. renouveau is built on SDL's rendering technology. It has no window decorations to prevent it from being moved around, as that has an effect on the output.
