nVidia Nouveau Driver

I remembered that I have an Xstreamer Ultra2 board in my collection. It's an Atom/ION board with a GT520 (Fermi) card which is a little more recent than the 9400GT you have. It boots both images (GBM and Legacy) to the Kodi home screen without needing an xorg.conf or kodi.conf file creating. It does require some nVidia firmware blobs extracted from the vendor driver to silence a couple of system log messages and provide firmware for decoding. I created https://github.com/LibreELEC/nouveau-firmware earlier to address that, and the commits in my nouveau branch are revised to use it and remove VAAPI support.

The GBM image detects libva support and tries to use it during playback, and fails. Rebuilding without VAAPI support allows software decode playback to work. There is no VDPAU support because mesa reports ERROR: Feature gallium-vdpau cannot be enabled: VDPAU state tracker requires X11 support. during compile. I'll have a chat about VDPAU with mesa devs, but GBM without hardware decode makes no sense, so for now, further effort on GBM (Nouveau) stops.

The X11 image is also now built without VAAPI support and VDPAU is detected and attempted. All 1080p and H264 media I've tried currently fails with VDPAU::Open: requested picture dimensions (1920, 1088) exceed hardware capabilities ( 0, 0) but some 720p/SD resolution MPEG4 media is being hardware decoded properly. I'll have to query the error with Kodi folks.

LE requires two partitions to run from and /flash and /storage must be separate. As you can now drop the 'Nouveau' image that should make things easier for testing. Please remove any config that's been added to boot params or /storage or make a clean install so you are using a default image. Also focus only on the 9400GT card for now. I appreciate the old cards work on Slackware, but your Slackware install is using significantly older software versions and bisecting to find the breaking changes will be a major effort, so that's deferred to a future date.

NB: I've pushed an image that matches GitHub commits a few seconds ago. Please check all is okay with the Legacy image after the cleanup or fresh start.

NB: Reading https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/VideoAcceleration.html it's clear lots of older cards have no VDPAU support. Can you confirm this with the GeForce 6100 card under Slackware? (press 'o' on the keyboard during Kodi playback to check).

Quote from Johpin

Two version back Kodi was also shown with a Geforce 6100 (it was usable).

For clarity, are we talking about my image (two versions back) or Slackware?

The screenshot is from my image, or Slackware?

Please check one of the older cards (6100 or 7300) on:

Slackware development image, working?

Current LE image, working?

Please pastebin a Kodi debug log from the Slackware install (9400GT card) to confirm the VDPAU error/issue is the same.

I'm not interested in compile issues and testing with newer Kodi because there are Kodi GitHub indications of VDPAU issues with nouveau being present for a long time. Patching FFMpeg just complicates the issue (and you have invalid/incomplete patches). Kodi GBM is not compatible with X11 so failure is probably correct/expected, and we know GBM without VDPAU is a dead-end so no need to test - the info just adds noise/confusion.

Please remove any xorg.conf and kodi.conf files from /storage/.config or /run locations and create /storage/.kodi/userdata/advancedsettings.xml to enable debug logging (even if Kodi does not start) and then reboot to capture a clean and more useful failure log. Please provide full debug logs (not snippets, which are not informative) showing 1080p/H264 media playback for:

a) Slackware-current on 7300LE

b) Slackware-current on 9400GT

c) Latest LE 'Legacy' image on 7300LE

d) Latest LE 'Legacy' image on 9400GT

Apologies for the rework. And I appreciate you are trying to be creative, but it's just confusing the task. Four full debug logs on standard Slackware and the latest LE image will be helpful.

info <general>: GL_VENDOR = Mesa
info <general>: GL_RENDERER = llvmpipe (LLVM 19.1.7, 128 bits)
info <general>: GL_VERSION = 4.5 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 24.3.4

^ The 7300 log shows it fails to evaluate VDPAU (because https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/VideoAcceleration.html shows 7-series is not currently supported) then falls back to llvmpipe, so it's not using nouveau. LE only builds mesa with nouveau, not with swrast or llvmpipe (although that could be changed) so this explains why you see the GUI.

info <general>: GL_VENDOR = Mesa
info <general>: GL_RENDERER = NV96
info <general>: GL_VERSION = 3.3 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 24.3.4

^ The 9400 inits VDPAU and uses nouveau, but:

2025-01-30 11:48:08.789 T:1589  warning <general>: VDPAU::Open: requested picture dimensions (1920, 800) exceed hardware capabilities ( 0, 0).
2025-01-30 11:48:08.789 T:1589     info <general>:  (VDPAU) Close
2025-01-30 11:48:08.791 T:1589     info <general>: VDPAU::Close - closing decoder context

^ The 9400 fails with the same error that I see on the LE image (which proves it's not LE related).

Quote from Johpin

MPlayer required only 35% CPU load on Slackware with 7300LE. For 9400GT the load is higher (more system) 75%

^ The interesting thing here is that llvmpipe appears to be more efficient at software decode than nouveau.

In summary: the Slackware image support and behaviour with nouveau/VDPAU is exactly the same as the LE image. Thanks for sharing the full logs, it really helped to un-confuse things

The firmware files required for newer nVidia cards are distributed as part of the vendor driver package which ships with a license that prevents separate redistribution of component parts of the driver. The approach taken by most distros is to package a script that downloads, extracts, and installs the firmware files where they need to be on first bood; so I've reworked the package to do the same. It does require a reboot to setup the firmware overlay from /storage/.config/firmware/nouveuu, but that's not too bad.

I'll have a look at building llvmpipe into the image as a fallback.

Please update to the Legacy image in my test share which should now have LLVM support. Please see if that runs on the 6100 or 7300LE cards? If yes, share a Kodi debug log.

NB: Firmware will download on the first boot of the image. Please also check it's present in /storage/.config/firmware/nouveau?

EDIT: I'm also interested to know if you have working audio output on the LE image?

The VDPAU::Open: requested picture dimensions (1920, 800) exceed hardware capabilities ( 0, 0) is the result of building mesa without support for patent codecs (VC1, H264, H265) hence only the free codecs (MPEG1/2/4) work. Configuring mesa build options with -Dvideo-codecs=all gives working hardware decode. Please validate that with the 9400GT card and the latest image posted to my test share.

I'm not sure what mesa juju is required for fallback to LLVM on the older 6100/7300 cards. I need to find the Slackware mesa and Kodi build configs to see if I can spot the difference(s).

Not sure what the reboot issue is about (no issues here). Flakey bootloader?

The more reading I do on nouveau, the more obvious it is that anything before GeForce 8-series is uncharted territory. As the LE12 release used the nVidia 340.108 driver which also didn't support anything below 8-series, the obvious design decision is to simply not-support anything older than 8-series cards. That also removes the need to build with LLVM support (saves build time), and that avoids the runtime complexity of picking the right mesa back-end based on PCI card ID's.

I'll continue to look at the no-audio problem on my Xtreamer Ultra2 board, but that's probably an isolated issue.