While the “Nova” driver continues to be developed as a modern Rust-written, open-source and in-kernel NVIDIA graphics driver for Linux, for the time being Nouveau is what’s working for end-users for those wanting a mainline open-source NVIDIA graphics driver for gaming and other workloads. With Linux 6.19 the Nouveau driver is picking up support for handling larger pages as well as compression support.
Sent out today was the latest round of drm-misc-next updates intended for Linux 6.19. Standing out there on the Nouveau side is enabling support for larger pages and compression support.
With the necessary Nouveau memory management changes in place, support for pages larger than the kernel’s page size is supported. The patches explain:
“Currently memory allocated by VM_BIND uAPI can only have a granuality matching PAGE_SIZE (4KiB in common case)
To have a better memory management and to allow big (64KiB) and huge (2MiB) pages later in the serie, we are now passing the page shift all around the internals of UVMM.
…
Now that everything in UVMM knows about the variable page shift, we can select larger values.The proposed approach rely on nouveau_bo::page unless it would cause alignment issues (in which case we fall back to searching an appropriate shift)”
Plus the patches also add support for compressed PTE kinds for NVIDIA GSP-RM supported hardware.
Other changes part of this drm-misc-next pull today include the Qualcomm AI accelerator driver “QAIC” adding sysfs and coredumo support plus also adding run-time power management support. The Intel IVPU accelerator driver meanwhile added FDINFO memory statistics support. The AMDXDNA accelerator driver also now handles preemption.
