There hasn't been too much to report on the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" kernel driver in some time since the enabling of Turing and no apparent progress on re-clocking to allow the graphics cards to hit their rated clock frequencies (the longstanding, number one limitation for this open-source driver), but some changes were sent in today for the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel merge window.

Red Hat's Ben Skeggs who oversees the Nouveau DRM driver sent in the material they have accumulated for this next Linux kernel cycle:

Changes include HD audio fixes for newer systems, vGPU detection albeit not actually doing anything yet, interlaced mode fixes, SVM improvements, NVIDIA format modifiers support, and other fixes.

The only "big feature" of this merge is the NVIDIA format modifiers support that has been available in patch form for a number of months and finally now being mainlined. This in turn with Mesa patches can then expose the likes of EGL's EXT_transition_format_modifier extension. NVIDIA contributed the format modifiers support to the Nouveau driver stack both on kernel side and with Mesa patches as well.

The list of fixes and other items for Nouveau in Linux 5.8 can be found via this merge request, which is already pulled into DRM-Next ahead of the 5.8 cycle kicking off in early June.