Former Nouveau Lead Developer Joins NVIDIA, Continues Working On Open-Source Driver

Following last year Nouveau receiving support for running with the NVIDIA GSP firmware and initial GeForce RTX 40 series accelerated support, Ben Skeggs of Red Hat unexpectedly resigned as the Nouveau kernel driver maintainer. It turns out this longtime open-source Nouveau driver developer is now employed by NVIDIA Corp and continuing to work on the open-source Linux graphics driver.

Ben Skeggs is at NVIDIA. I'm not sure what is more surprising that he is at the green giant or that he's able to continue working on the Nouveau driver in an official capacity. Ben Skeggs has been involved with the Nouveau project for more than a decade.

After months of being absent in Nouveau driver development happenings, last night he posted a set of 156 patches. This massive patch series is a follow-up to the Nouveau GSP firmware enablement work and cleans up the code. The focus on the series is replacing the ioctl-like interface between the NVKM and the Nouveau DRM driver to now leverage more direct calls for reducing the driver overhead and call chain complexity. In the process there's also a fair amount of code cleaning. The 156 patches affect around ten thousand lines of code.

And this big patch series is submitted from his new NVIDIA work email address:

While NVIDIA has their open (out of tree) kernel drivers these days, it wasn't on my bingo card to see Ben Skeggs at NVIDIA and to continue contributing directly to Nouveau. Interesting times ahead...