Graphic drivers - Goals & Ideas

[Stewart Adam]

Hi,

I'd like to make installing, using and updating the GPU drivers as easy
as possible for the end user, so let me know what you like or dislike
about the below. Based on the the last discussion (Naming of the nVidia 
drivers in RPMFusion), these are the things we're aiming for WRT GPU 
drivers and rpmfusion:

- Parallel-installable drivers

- A new, easy to use livna-config-display that will get rid of the 
Xgl/AIGLX stuff and instead, suggest the recommended driver for your 
card. As well, users will be able to override which driver is currently 
being used (ie, "I want to use legacy series 71xx instead of 96xx" when 
96xx was autoselected based on the GPU)

- 5 nVidia branches: legacy (71), legacy (96), stable (173), stable
(177) and beta

I thought a bit about how we could implement these and came up with a
few other things to discuss:

- Package naming: I like what Thorsten has suggested and we have the 
drivers named by version, and then create metapackages which will track 
the appropriate versions. As a bonus, this also makes the name easier to 
remember. At the moment, "nvidia-legacy" would track 
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-71 and xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-96. "nvidia-stable" would 
track xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-173 and xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-177. Any final 
words on this?

- By tracking all stable/legacy/beta drivers at once, the initscripts
can autoselect the best driver and hopefully that will reduce the number
of times users are left without X because a driver dropped support for
some GPUs. But, if this does happen (for example when nVidia released
the 103 series driver as stable and moved 96 to legacy), we should 
announce this on an rpmfusion ML, the wiki's News page and I'll try to 
get it out on FedoraForum as well.

- For autoselection of the appropriate driver, I'm leaning towards a
small databank of each GPU's PCI ID and the required driver which the
initscripts could parse and base their decision off of that. Is there
anything easier/simpler that I looked over?

If everyone likes what's mentioned here then I'll start working on the 
new RPM spec files and redoing the GUI bits of livna-config-display.

Stewart