As part of the Rust DRM drivers now having their own development tree, sent out today was the first pull request from the drm-rust-fixes branch.
The first batch of changes from the drm-rust-fixes branch for the Linux 6.17 kernel include one item worth highlighting: the open-source NVIDIA “Nova” driver now is explicitly requiring 64-bit kernels for building and using the driver. In reality this shouldn’t impact any users with real-world workflows. The Nova driver just works with the NVIDIA Turing (RTX 20) and newer GPUs due to the dependence on the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP).
This means roughly NVIDIA GPUs from the past six years are supported by Nova. Aside from some very exotic system configurations, all those users with a new-ish NVIDIA GPU should be running a 64-bit kernel / operating system. Short of being all-in on 32-bit for sentimental reasons, trying to stuff a modern NVIDIA GPU into an obsolete x86 system, or any other wild ideas, this now mandated 64-bit requirement for the Nova driver shouldn’t really bite anyone. Note to mention, most Linux distributions are going x86_64 focused only and phasing out their i686 install media, etc.
The patch now mandated CONFIG_64BIT for the Nova core DRM driver is being applied since otherwise the Rust code is running into build issues.
That’s the only patch to call out with this week’s DRM fixes pull request for Linux 6.17 with the only other one being for updating the MAINTAINERS file to reflect the new Rust DRM tree.
