Merged for the current Linux 6.16 cycle was initial NVIDIA Blackwell GPU support with the Nouveau open-source driver. NVIDIA Blackwell GPU support was tacked onto the existing Nouveau kernel driver rather than having to wait for the new “NOVA” driver and like prior generations continuing to leverage the GSP firmware. For going along with that Nouveau support, the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver support for Blackwell continues being put together too.
In a few merges in recent weeks, the NVIDIA Blackwell / GeForce RTX 50 support has been coming together for the NVK Vulkan driver within Mesa. Faith Ekstrand of Collabora merged the QMD 5.0 support in the NAK compiler along with various enabling patches for Blackwell GPUs. Yesterday a number of patches from Red Hat’s David Airlie were also merged for Blackwell support with the Nouveau winsys and various other changes.
The initial bits of NVIDIA Blackwell support now appear to be in shape for next quarter’s Mesa 25.2 release. At the moment the only open merge request around Blackwell in Mesa is this MR opened hours ago for adding Blackwell separate depth/stencil support. Hopefully for Mesa 25.2 there ends up being a nice baseline level of Blackwell support in the open-source NVK Vulkan driver. As relayed before, for those interested in OpenGL support, Nouveau is now focused on using NVK with Zink for OpenGL rather than continuing to work on the NVC0 Gallium3D driver.
As this Blackwell support matures I’ll be working on some Nouveau + NVK benchmarks in relation to NVIDIA’s official Linux driver stack.
