Nouveau DRM Tree Sees Updates Ahead Of Linux 4.20

While there has been lots of Intel updates and tons of AMDGPU activity in DRM-Next for the upcoming Linux 4.20~5.0 cycle, there hadn't been any changes to the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver while at least today the Nouveau DRM tree has seen some new updates.

Not queued yet in DRM-Next, but today a batch of new commits hit the Nouveau DRM development tree and the first new bits to land in the tree in the past month. Ben Skeggs of Red Hat and the Nouveau DRM maintainer has pushed the latest set of changes. However, it isn't all that exciting as it mostly just contains some display fixes, some work around HDMI 2.0, a memory leak fix, and mostly other maintenance work.

The period of new feature work is over for DRM-Next with the Linux 4.20~5.0 cycle already potentially coming up in just over a week, but given these latest Nouveau DRM changes are basically fixes, presumably they'll be let in if Skeggs submits the pull request.

Sadly what isn't part of this tree isn't any GeForce RTX 20 "Turing" enablement, nothing new on the Volta front, and most notably still no re-clocking support for Maxwell/Pascal GPUs nor any automatic re-clocking for older generations like Kepler. As a result, the performance will still be very poor but at least part of the challenge with the re-clocking state for Maxwell/Pascal is on NVIDIA releasing the PMU firmware, which there are no indications they plan to do.

The latest work in the Nouveau DRM tree can be found on GitHub.