Bug#558788: add nouveau in squeeze, please

[Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de>]

Package: xserver-xorg-video-nouveau
Severity: normal

Hi,

there are a few problems which will probably prevent nouveau
from being added to Squeeze:

First, Squeeze is certainly going to be shipped with 2.6.32
since it is a kernel with long-term support from upstream.
Since Debian puts a strong emphasis on stability and long-term
stable support, it is very likely that it will be shipped with
2.6.32. The problem now is that nouveau modesetting and drm
support is not in 2.6.32 but it was first introduced with
2.6.33. Thus, in order to use nouveau together with Squeeze,
the nouveau drm and modesetting code will have to be backported
from 2.6.33 which Ubuntu did for their due 10.04 release.

Secondly, even if the nouveau code gets backported to 2.6.32,
there is still the problem that the nouveau xorg driver has
received significant changes in the drm API which are incompatible
to all drm code prior to 2.6.34. Thus, the current upstream
nouveau version cannot be used without a lot of efforts of
backporting or people will have to stick to the current version
of nouveau from experimental which, however, still needs the
backporting of the drm code from 2.6.32 to 2.6.33.

My suggestion therefore is to drop nouveau for Squeeze and
rather wait until 2.6.34 is released and makes it into unstable.
At this point, the kernel will provide all necessary drm and
modesetting code in a hopefully mature state.

Adrian

-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-3-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) (ignored: LC_ALL set to en_US.UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash