Nouveau Changes Queue Ahead Of Linux 4.19

Linux 4.19 is going to be another exciting kernel on the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) front with a lot of good stuff included while hours ago we finally got a look at what's in store for the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver.

Nouveau DRM maintainer Ben Skeggs of Red Hat has updated the Nouveau DRM tree of the latest batch of patches ahead of sending in the pull request to DRM-Next. As has been the trend in recent times, the Nouveau DRM work mostly boils down to bug/regression fixes.

There are no major exciting features queued for the Nouveau DRM driver for what's expected to hit Linux 4.19. In particular, no breakthroughs on the re-clocking front for allowing newer NVIDIA GPUs to operate at their optimal clock frequencies. With that said, the aging GeForce GTX 600/700 "Kepler" GPUs remain the sweet spot for the best performance potential on this open-source driver but even there you need to be manually re-clocking the card with automatic re-clocking still being not a reality. I recently summed up the current situation in The NVIDIA vs. Open-Source Nouveau Linux Driver Benchmarks For Summer 2018. The only re-clocking change that seems noteworthy for Linux 4.19 is to wake up the GPU before re-clocking, which should help address some re-clocking issues on PRIME laptops with a re-clocking-capable NVIDIA GPU.

While the Linux 4.18 kernel brings Volta GV100 NVIDIA support to Nouveau, with Linux 4.19 that remains very basic and is again hampered by the signed NVIDIA firmware images like Maxwell2 and Pascal. On the fixes front, the only other change appearing to stand out are some DisplayPort MST (Multi-Stream Transport) fixes.