Red Hat's Long, Rust'ed Road Ahead For Nova As Nouveau Driver Successor

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Red Hat's Long, Rust'ed Road Ahead For Nova As Nouveau Driver Successor

Red Hat's display driver team has recently been devising plans for Nova, a new to-be-developed Linux DRM kernel driver written in Rust for open-source NVIDIA graphics support as the successor/replacement to Nouveau for newer NVIDIA GPU generations supporting the GPU System Processor (GSP). Making this effort all the more involved is being written in Rust at a time when various kernel abstractions are still being devised and not yet upstreamed...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Red-Hat-Nova-Rust-Abstractions

[Beryesa]

Given GSP is still proprietary, these mesa drivers won't be able to save i.e. the Turing series when Nvidia eventually drops them from the GSP, can they?
Is this actually any better than the proprietary driver when it comes to software EoL & live until the kernel interface breaks?

[mantide]

I am thinking about removing C++ from my resume. I wasn't good at it anyway. I do like rust a LOT.

[intelfx]

Given GSP is still proprietary, these mesa drivers won't be able to save i.e. the Turing series when Nvidia eventually drops them from the GSP, can they?
Is this actually any better than the proprietary driver when it comes to software EoL & live until the kernel interface breaks?

What's stopping them from shipping the last supported GSP version for those GPUs?

Also, those aren't "mesa drivers". This article talks about the kernel DRM driver.

[kylew77]

I wonder how this can be leveraged by other OSes than Linux that don't have anything but VESA for Nvidia graphics. OpenBSD and NetBSD don't have much for Nvidia graphics though Net does have an old version of Nouveau but lacks support for newer Nvidia GPUs. Illumos kernel OSes I am not for sure on, once upon a time the Unix driver worked on Solaris but I am unsure how Illumos and Solaris have drifted apart if the Unix driver that works on Solaris and FreeBSD works on those OSes. Being written in Rust will be a problem point for those C kernel that have no Rust support in kernel. Wish they would have gone with well written C for OS compatibility.

[davidbepo]

ughhhhhhh

[jeisom]

Given GSP is still proprietary, these mesa drivers won't be able to save i.e. the Turing series when Nvidia eventually drops them from the GSP, can they?
Is this actually any better than the proprietary driver when it comes to software EoL & live until the kernel interface breaks?

They are distributed in the linux-firmware package. The only reason they'd stop working is if the kernel developers break it at that point.

[EliasOfWaffle]

Given GSP is still proprietary, these mesa drivers won't be able to save i.e. the Turing series when Nvidia eventually drops them from the GSP, can they?
Is this actually any better than the proprietary driver when it comes to software EoL & live until the kernel interface breaks?

Nvidia will never drop GSP for actual GPUs, because GSP is a processor (GPU System Processor), is a RISC-V embedded processor, that handle all necessary tasks for avoid CPU to make it, in the same way thermal is too handled by GSP processor, the GSP firmware is just for enable use GSP, all hardware initialization and thermal handling including some memory management and display is handled by GSP processor, Kernel DRM driver just have to make a interface for GSP

[EliasOfWaffle]

What's stopping them from shipping the last supported GSP version for those GPUs?

Also, those aren't "mesa drivers". This article talks about the kernel DRM driver.

Will not be stopping in this way, GSP firmware is already in linux-firmware, this means if nvidia will drop olders GPUs, GSP firmwares will continues to live in linux-firmware

[pharmasolin]

I'm imagining for example Ubuntu installer with a window "please select driver for your GPU" and 3 options with brief explanation, like its character race selection in RPG, with each pros and cons. Nightmare