NVIDIA Has A "Great Experience" Working With Nouveau Community

Alexandre Courbot spoke at FOSDEM this past weekend about enabling the NVIDIA Tegra K1's "GKA20A" Kepler-based graphics processor with the open-source Nouveau driver.

While on the desktop side NVIDIA is mostly just focused on the NVIDIA Linux binary blob and they just toss some table scraps (documentation and technical answers) to Nouveau developers every so often, when it comes to the Tegra line-up they actively have been working on Nouveau support as covered in many articles on Phoronix. NVIDIA contributed GK20A support to the Nouveau DRM driver and extending the Nouveau Gallium3D driver for supporting the Kepler-based graphics of this modern ARM SoC.

Alexandre Courbot of NVIDIA shared the Nouveau work they did on the GK20A, some of the challenges they've had, and various technical details about Tegra. Where they're at right now is that the GK20A is close to working out-of-the-box with Nouveau but outstanding challenges include the need to distribute the firmware blobs and there's some Nouveau DRM kernel and Mesa patches not yet merged. The NVIDIA crew had "great experience working with the Nouveau community" and they plan to keep contributing support to Nouveau for future Tegra SoCs.

Those interested in more details can see the PDF slides of the presentation for those that weren't in Brussels last weekend.