Nouveau Patches Begin Lining Up For Linux 4.11 Kernel

Ben Skeggs at Red Hat has begun aligning the latest Nouveau DRM patches that in turn will be submitted to DRM-Next for the Linux 4.11 kernel merge window.

Skeggs landed a ton of code today into the Nouveau DRM Git repository. Among the work being staged includes the work by Karol Herbst on exposing the power budget caps via hwmon, Ben has done some improvements for improved GPU recovery for Kepler, support for changing the PCI-E link speeds with the G92 chipset, and the latest work from NVIDIA on Secure Boot code refactoring, and a new Falcon library lands and is made use of by NVIDIA's code for enhancing the code quality. There's also a fix for HDMI audio on the GT215 and a few other fixes/workarounds.

That seems to sum up the code that landed in the Nouveau DRM tree today for Linux 4.11. We'll see if anything else comes prior to Skeggs sending in the pull request to DRM-Next. Not found in this code for Linux 4.11 is any major re-clocking improvements nor have we received the signed firmware blobs yet from NVIDIA for enabling 3D acceleration on the consumer GeForce GTX 1050/1060/1070/1080 Pascal GPUs. So at least through Linux 4.11, the best Nouveau experience remains with older Kepler GPUs where you can at least get decent, 3D-accelerated performance.