F14 + two cards + nouveau = fail?

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Sunday, October 24, 2010 01:57:27 DJ Delorie wrote:
> I have a setup with two GeForce 9800 GT cards, each with two monitors.
> I've tried F13, F14alpha, and now F14beta and I've never gotten my
> four-monitor setup to work right.
> 
> I want all four monitors in a cluster as a single desktop.
> 
> I currently use F12 with the nvidia driver and Xinerama, but rendering
> performance is very slow sometimes.
> 
> With F14 the best I can do is EITHER xrandr the two monitors on the
> first card and SEPARATELY xrandr the two on the second card, OR
> xinerama the first monitor on each card (the second monitors clone the
> first).
> 
> Has ANYONE gotten nouveau working nicely with >1 cards and >2 monitors?

You can take a look at http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix . 
Your card is nv50 family, and apparently both dual-head and multicard are 
implemented, so you should try it out. However, nouveau is still under heavy 
development, and you may encounter some bugs, if you have a setup that nobody 
tried out before.

And since both dual-head and multicard have a "DONE" status for nv50, these 
features should be supported, and any bugs attended to if you are willing to 
report them and provide relevant info for the developers. They are quite 
forthcoming and will try to help you if something doesn't work.

OTOH, they might ask you to run the latest driver-kernel-Xorg combination from 
git, which sometimes means having to recompile all that manually. It is up to 
you if you are willing to do that extra work, although it might not be needed 
in your particular case. YMMV.

They also have a mailing list, feel free to describe your setup there and ask 
if what you want is possible/feasible with nouveau at this stage. Maybe they 
already know even without you trying it out. ;-)

HTH, :-)
Marko