NVIDIA Fermi On Nouveau Makes Baby Steps Towards Memory Re-Clocking

While NVIDIA's GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" graphics cards have since been succeeded by Kepler, Maxwell, and now Pascal, the Fermi hardware is still receiving some love from open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) developers in taking baby steps towards working re-clocking support.

While Maxwell and Pascal don't yet have any GPU/memory re-clocking support in large part due to complications by NVIDIA's new signed firmware approach, Fermi isn't affected by that obstacle but it's still a big undertaking. Only NVIDIA's Kepler hardware is any recent NVIDIA GPU with good re-clocking support on Nouveau. Longtime Nouveau contributor Roy Spliet has sent out patches prepping for some video memory related changes for Fermi.

The patches are prep work for Fermi DRAM clock changes. These patches alone don't make memory re-clocking possible, but they are just "the prepatork work that [Roy Spliet] deem stable enough to move upstream." More details on this work via this patch series. Great to see Roy continuing to improve open-source Fermi GPU support. With DRM-Next material not being accepted any longer for 4.12, this work could be merged for Linux 4.13 at the earliest -- we can also hope there are more magical re-clocking patches by that point.