NVIDIA Sent Out Some Fresh Nouveau Patches Just Before Christmas

Shortly before Christmas were a couple open-source Nouveau driver patches volleyed by NVIDIA. Some of that work is now queuing in the Nouveau DRM tree ahead of the Linux 5.6 merge window.

Some of the recent Nouveau work courtesy of NVIDIA engineers include generalizing the NV Block Linear DRM format and supporting NVIDIA format modifiers in atomic mode-setting blobs. Those go along with work by NVIDIA's James Jones with Mesa patches in then exposing EGL's EXT_transition_format_modifier support. As Jones explained, "This allows differentiating between surfaces compatible with Tegra GPUs and desktop GPUs, improved performance when using the compressed layouts, and differentiating between formats supported by nvc0-class hardware and other GPU families which use slightly different variations of the block linear buffer layout."

Meanwhile on the latest-generation NVIDIA Turing front is supporting the new simplified page kind scheme. It's nice seeing Turing patches from NVIDIA though there still is no 3D hardware acceleration for Turing GPUs on Nouveau, namely blocked by NVIDIA releasing the necessary signed firmware images for this hardware before the open-source Nouveau developers can work towards hardware support.

Yesterday was a fresh push of code into the Nouveau DRM tree though nothing else exciting to talk about for the upcoming Linux 5.6 cycle... No major new Turing bits there nor anything on the re-clocking front. Though we're hopeful NVIDIA could finally make a good open-source announcement in March.