Former Nouveau Lead Developer Joins NVIDIA, Continues Working On Open-Source Driver

Written by Michael Larabel in Nouveau on 17 April 2024 at 06:45 AM EDT. 127 Comments
NOUVEAU
Following last year Nouveau receiving support for running with the NVIDIA GSP firmware and initial GeForce RTX 40 series accelerated support, Ben Skeggs of Red Hat unexpectedly resigned as the Nouveau kernel driver maintainer. It turns out this longtime open-source Nouveau driver developer is now employed by NVIDIA Corp and continuing to work on the open-source Linux graphics driver.

Ben Skeggs is at NVIDIA. I'm not sure what is more surprising that he is at the green giant or that he's able to continue working on the Nouveau driver in an official capacity. Ben Skeggs has been involved with the Nouveau project for more than a decade.

After months of being absent in Nouveau driver development happenings, last night he posted a set of 156 patches. This massive patch series is a follow-up to the Nouveau GSP firmware enablement work and cleans up the code. The focus on the series is replacing the ioctl-like interface between the NVKM and the Nouveau DRM driver to now leverage more direct calls for reducing the driver overhead and call chain complexity. In the process there's also a fair amount of code cleaning. The 156 patches affect around ten thousand lines of code.

And this big patch series is submitted from his new NVIDIA work email address:

Ben Skeggs NVIDIA


While NVIDIA has their open (out of tree) kernel drivers these days, it wasn't on my bingo card to see Ben Skeggs at NVIDIA and to continue contributing directly to Nouveau. Interesting times ahead...
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week