Compute Support Is Moving Along For Nouveau

Longtime Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst who joined Red Hat at the end of 2017 continues working on Nouveau compute support along with fellow hat-wearing open-source graphics driver developer Rob Clark.

Karol was initially working on NIR support for Nouveau as part of this effort for getting OpenCL compute going atop this reverse-engineered, open-source NVIDIA driver by taking advantage of existing SPIR-V to NIR support. That NIR intermediate representation support has been getting into shape while a separate effort is also working on SPIR-V support for Clover.

This Nouveau NIR support will also help with the goal of potentially having an open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver this calendar year.

One week after publishing the initial patches for Nouveau compute by Karol and Rob, the latest patches are now available.

There are a number of changes with these latest patches. It will certainly be interesting to see how quickly these Red Hat developers manage to get Nouveau compute support working in a worthwhile manner... Any how useful it will end up being too with re-clocking still being a big problem for recent generations of NVIDIA GPUs on this driver and leading to slow performance.