New Nouveau Patch Would Allow Optionally Enabling GSP Mode By Default

With the Nouveau driver support for using the NVIDIA GSP (GPU System Processor) that was added in Linux 6.7, that is only used by default on the GeForce RTX 40 "Ada" GPUs and moving forward where otherwise there is no accelerated support. The NVIDIA GSP is present in the GeForce RTX 20 "Turing" and RTX 30 "Ampere" hardware too, but not used by default unless setting a module option to enable the mode. However, a new patch is pending that would allow kernel builders to optionally enable the GSP mode by default.

Using the NVIDIA GSP support for better power management / re-clocking with the Nouveau driver does require having all the GSP firmware binaries present on the system. But given it's a new path and not thoroughly tested, it's not used by default except for RTX 40 (and future) where it's basically needed for any level of accelerated support.

David Airlie today posted a small patch that would allow optionally enabling the GSP mode by default. He explained in that patch:

"Turing and Ampere will continue to use the old paths by default, but we should allow distros to decide what the policy is."

The patch adds the DRM_NOUVEAU_GSP_DEFAULT Kconfig option for kernel builders to decide on the default Nouveau driver behavior.