This week the Rust DRM changes intended for the Linux 7.0 merge window were sent out by Danilo Krummrich. The Apple Silicon Asahi Linux “AGX” DRM kernel driver still isn’t positioned for upstreaming to the mainline kernel so that leaves most of the Rust DRM upstream work currently around the NVIDIA Nova driver as well as the Arm Mali Tyr drivers.
The open-source NVIDIA Nova driver development continues being worked on by engineers from NVIDIA, Red Hat, and others. It’s still a lengthy bring-up process with end-users for now having the existing Nouveau kernel driver paired with Mesa if not wanting to use NVIDIA’s official packaged Linux driver stack. Much of the Nova focus recently has been doing enough bring-up work for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 / GTX 1600 series Turing GPU hardware.
With Linux 7.0 the preparations for Turing GPU support in Nova continued but not yet crossing the finish line of actual enablement. The Nova Core code now can parse and handle Turing-specific firmware headers and sections plus the Turing Falcon HAL implementation.
Beyond the Turing preparations, there are various Rust code improvements to Nova, improved handling of unexpected firmware values, cleaning up redundant debug print statements, and other changes.
On the Tyr driver front for that Arm Mali driver option, there is various code improvements this cycles but nothing too exciting from the end-user perspective.
The full list of Rust DRM feature changes for Linux 7.0 via this pull request to DRM-Next.
