Nouveau Changes For Linux 5.9 Bring Fixes, Prep For Future Improvements

With basically at the cut-off for new feature material wanting to get into DRM-Next for Linux 5.9, Nouveau DRM maintainer Ben Skeggs of Red Hat today sent in the primary feature pull.

There isn't a whole lot to the open-source NVIDIA driver changes for Linux 5.9, which come in addition to the Nouveau CRC support that came by way of DRM-Misc-Next.

Skeggs sums up the Nouveau Linux 5.9 changes as "nothing too exciting here, most of it is (a lot of) trivial prep-work for future improvements."

Among the fixes and code improvements are cleaning up code to make use of official NVIDIA header files where available, proper push buffer space management for EVO/NVD channels, fixes for firmware loading in some cases, 2MiB system memory pages support for Pascal GPUs and newer, and other random work.

See this pull request for the list of changes in full. Sadly nothing new to report on improved power management / re-clocking, which is the number one limitation of this open-source NVIDIA GPU driver right now on Linux as until the re-clocking is in order the performance is severely limited from the GTX 900 through RTX 2000 series hardware.