Comment 80 for bug 546393

Νίκος Αλεξανδρής, the nouveau driver works fine on most nvidia hardware I have thrown at it, just not the mbp5,x series. I consider it ready for use (at the very least, ready to replace "nv"). This is a bug with that driver with this particular adapter. Furthermore, nvidia has officially discontinued the old "nv" driver. New nvidia cards will *not* be supported by it, and it is effectively dead as nobody outside nvidia supports it as far as anybody i've spoken to can tell. Shipping with nv on a LTS is somewhat short problematic, I assume.

Also, while we are talking about accelerated graphics, we are not talking about 3D graphics. The graphics driver can accelerate lots of non-3D drawing functions all without needing OpenGL/mesa/gallium. The nouveau driver as shipped with Lucid does not have any 3D capability, but does support other handy acceleration methods (eg. xrender)

The problem in this bug is the Lucid hangs during boot with a particular piece of hardware (said graphics adapters in macbookpro5,X units). Ideally the nouveau could be patched to work with it. Failing that, blacklisting these cards so they can fall back to either nv (or vesa, depending on support) would suffice. The Hanging during boot makes a very non-optimal out-of-the-box experience.