The X.Org Foundation Is Funding Work To Improve Nouveau Re-Clocking

The X.Org Foundation has decided to fund an Endless Vacation of Code project to improve the support for the Nouveau driver's re-clocking of several generations of NVIDIA GPUs.

Roy Spliet, an existing contributor to Nouveau, has managed to secure EVoC funding to reverse-engineer and implement NVA3/5/8 voltage and frequency scaling support within the open-source Nouveau driver. "For this project, I aim to tie these loose ends together for NVIDIAs NVA3/5/8 GPUs. His "REclock" proposal states, "I intend to fully reverse engineer several subcomponents related to voltage and frequency scaling, try to get a full understanding of the clock tree and use this gained knowledge to further improve the nouveau voltage and frequency scaling implementation for said GPUs."

Given that Roy is an existing Nouveau contributor and previously he worked on the re-clocking for NVAA and NVAC chipsets along with some work on NVC0 Fermi support, this EVoC project has good chances of being successful. It's estimated to take at least 12 weeks. Roy has also secured extra funding from the X.Org Foundation for purchasing additional NVIDIA hardware for furthering this re-clocking effort.

Confirmation of this X.Org EVoC re-clocking effort being approved was made on Thursday via the Nouveau list. This news comes as Nouveau in Linux 3.16 finally has basic re-clocking support for certain generations of hardware, is statically controlled, and still considered an experimental feature. My Nouveau Linux 3.16 re-clocking benchmarks are already complete and are in the publishing queue for next week.

For students interested in open-source graphics driver development, learn more about the X.Org EVoC.