NVIDIA Ampere GA103 Support For Nouveau Being Sent In For Linux 6.0
NVIDIA's GA103 GPU is used by the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and the open-source Nouveau driver support for it was finally posted earlier this month. But that GA103 enablement patch amounts to just a few lines of code adding the new chipset and having it take existing driver code-paths. The GA103 following the existing Ampere and prior driver code paths worked out fine in the testing by Red Hat's Karol Herbst.
Due to the trivial driver addition specific to just the GA103, it doesn't risk regressing existing hardware support and thus is a safe post-merge window addition that can be sent in as a "fix" to the kernel still for Linux 6.0.
Don't get too excited though as with the current Linux 6.0 support for NVIDIA Ampere GPUs, it basically means display/mode-setting support. The Ampere GPU accelerated support that goes along with the RTX 30 Ampere signed firmware files that NVIDIA published earlier this year didn't make the cut for the 6.0 merge window. But Red Hat engineers appear to be close in getting that kernel driver support squared away so hopefully for Linux 6.1 we'll finally see the open-source driver working with hardware acceleration and then OpenGL support with Nouveau's Mesa code. But there still is the matter of re-clocking support needed for better performance on Nouveau with modern GPUs and the experimental open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver still being in its early, out-of-tree state for Mesa.
But in any event if you have a GA103 / RTX 3060 Ti, at least the display support should be good to go with Linux 6.0 once these DRM fixes land in mainline. The other drm-misc fixes this week are all fairly small.
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