Nouveau Queues Up More Changes For Linux 3.10

The developers behind the reverse-engineered open-source Nouveau graphics driver for NVIDIA hardware are still hard at work on preparing new changes for introduction with the Linux 3.10 kernel.

Already for the next kernel cycle within the Nouveau DRM development tree has been NVC0 VRAM compression support. Some other queued up items include:

- Early support for the "GF117" GPU (commit). The GF117 is the graphics processor powering NVIDIA's new GeForce GT 620M. With the early GF117 support, it's a modification of a couple dozen lines of code. Ben Skeggs of Nouveau hasn't yet tested the GPU but has wired in the support in a similar manner to the GF119 graphics processor. For now it should be relatively safe to run this new code but he's disabling 3D by default until he can test the new NVIDIA Kepler graphics processor.

- Backlight control for the NVIDIA GeForce GT525M as well as Kepler GPUs (commit).

- Some NV50 temperature reading work (commit).

With the Linux 3.10 kernel, the Nouveau DRM driver will be bumped to version 1.1.1 to reflect recent kernel features. These features include support for tiled system memory buffer objects, support for compressed memory storage on Fermi and Kepler, support for software methods on Fermi, and other changes (commit).