NVIDIA Format Modifiers Coming To Nouveau In Linux 5.7

Now that the merge window is over for Linux 5.6, where the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver managed GeForce RTX 2000 "Turing" series accelerated support, a new feature addition landed Monday in the Nouveau kernel development tree for the next cycle.

The new code now in the Nouveau development tree is the NVIDIA Format Modifiers support. As explained in that earlier article, at the end of 2019 NVIDIA sent out a set of patches for supporting the NVIDIA format modifiers within atomic mode-setting blobs. In turn there are Mesa patches for exposing these format modifiers with the EGL EXT_transition_format_modifier support. The Mesa-side patches have yet to land but presumably will around the time the DRM format modifiers support is mainline in the Linux kernel.

Making use of the format modifier support can allow for improved performance when using compressed layouts and better handling of different supported surfaces.

That work across several patches was merged for what should be in Linux 5.7, unless it's like one of the times where Nouveau has been too tardy in submitting new feature code to DRM-Next, in which case it would then be delayed to Linux 5.8 later in the year. Here's to hoping Nouveau will have some more Linux 5.7 feature work to report on in the weeks ahead.