The NOVA open-source kernel graphics driver continues getting slowly built-up for the NVIDIA RTX 20 “Turing” and newer GPUs that sport the GPU System Processor (GSP) for easing the hardware initialization and management of modern NVIDIA GPUs within the mainline kernel. This Rust-written kernel driver now has patches pending for booting up the NVIDIA GSP to its RISC-V active state.
For those that don’t recall or weren’t active on the open-source Linux graphics driver scene, NVIDIA’s GSP is based on RISC-V and in turn driven in large part by this RISC-V micro-controller NVIDIA shipped around one billion RISC-V cores in their 2024 products.
NVIDIA engineer Alistair Popple posted a set of 10 patches today for the NOVA-Core open-source driver code for getting further along with initializing the GPU System Processor. With these patches the GSP gets into a state of becoming active and communicating with the host system.
While the GSP is put into a RISC-V active state, it’s not to the point of being “fully active” yet but further patches are to come.
Those interested in this latest code under review contributed by NVIDIA for their NOVA driver can find them on the dri-devel mailing list.
