It has been some months since last delivering any benchmarks of Nouveau, the open-source, community-driven for NVIDIA GPUs. The reason for not having any Nouveau benchmarks recently has largely been due to lack of major progress, at least on the GeForce desktop GPU side, while NVIDIA has continued to contribute on the Tegra side. For those wondering how the current performance is of this driver that started out more than a decade ago via reverse-engineering, here are some benchmarks of the latest open-source Nouveau and NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers on Ubuntu.

The Bootlin (formerly Free Electrons) developers working on the Cedrus open-source, reverse-engineered Allwinner video decode driver have posted their patches for enabling H.264 video decoding.

Earlier versions of their Sunxi-Cedrus driver patches had just supported MPEG-2 with other codecs to be tackled, but hitting the kernel mailing list this week were their patches for enabling H.264 decoding on Allwinner hardware.

The performance of the Intel Core i7-8809G "Kabylake G" processor with onboard Radeon "Vega M" graphics are looking quite good under Linux now that the support has been squared away.

Earlier this month AMD's Marek Olšák posted RadeonSI patches for a scissor workaround affecting GFX9/Vega GPUs including Raven Ridge, which were based upon a RADV driver workaround already merged that helped affected games by up to ~11%. A revised version of that patch is now in Mesa 18.2 Git.

This post does not describe a configuration system. If that's all you care about, read this post here and go be angry at someone else. Anyway, with that out of the way let's get started.

For a long time, libinput has supported model quirks (first added in Apr 2015). These model quirks are bitflags applied to some devices so we can enable special behaviours in the code. Model flags can be very specific ("this is a Lenovo x230 Touchpad") or generic ("This is a trackball") and it just depends on what the specific behaviour is that we need. The x230 touchpad for example has a custom pointer acceleration but trackballs are marked so they get some config options mice don't have/need.