Coming somewhat as a surprise is the Nouveau driver patches for enabling NVIDIA Blackwell and Hopper GPUs has now been queued to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.16 merge window. So barring any surprises, this next version of the Linux kernel will feature preliminary open-source mainline kernel driver support for these newer NVIDIA GPUs.
It was just a few weeks ago that Nouveau driver patches for Blackwell and Hopper GPUs were posted to the mailing list. Those patches were from Ben Skeggs, the former Nouveau lead developer at Red Hat who joined NVIDIA and has continued working on open-source driver support. It was just a few days ago that the Nouveau v2 patches for Blackwell and Hopper were posted and now today they have been queued into DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.16 merge window. The Linux 6.16 merge window will open next week if all goes well for finishing out Linux 6.15 without any delay otherwise will shift one week further out.
NVIDIA has their open-source out-of-tree kernel driver for Blackwell and Hopper while now there will be mainline kernel support with Nouveau and can then be used eventually with the Mesa NVK driver. This merge request for Mesa has yet to land but provides the initial Blackwell support for the NVK open-source Vulkan driver.
“Super early draft, but created for ease of review/collab. The intention is to add support for Blackwell in nvk; currently missing new/different methods and instruction encodings.”
For those rocking the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards, at least in the near to medium term the best features/performance will continue to be found with using the official NVIDIA Linux packaged driver stack. Nouveau performance still lags significantly behind the packaged driver stack though there is hope with the in-development and modern NOVA driver the performance will become more competitive but that will take time.
As with the other NVIDIA GPU support in Nouveau since the Turing generation, this Hopper and Blackwell open-source driver support does depend upon NVIDIA’s signed GPU System Processor “GSP” firmware binaries. A few days ago that R570 GSP firmware for Blackwell and Hopper was upstreamed to the linux-firmware.git repository.
This merge today to DRM-Next has the 4,619 insertions and 8,090 deletions for lining up the initial Blackwell and Hopper GPU support for Nouveau. I’ll be firing up some benchmarks soon once the new DRM-Next material is merged to mainline for Linux 6.16.
