Merged for the Linux 6.15 kernel were the very early boilerplate code around the NOVA driver as a new, open-source and Rust-written NVIDIA Linux kernel graphics/display driver. This successor to the Nouveau kernel driver is going to leverage the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) to make it easier to develop and maintain this open-source driver. But depending upon the GSP also means the NOVA driver will only work with RTX 20 class GPUs and newer. This driver is going to be built up gradually within the mainline Linux kernel and coming out this Easter were a new set of 16 patches for further laying the NOVA groundwork.
NVIDIA engineer Alexandre Courbot posted a set of 16 patches today for the NOVA open-source driver to work on running the FWSEC-FRTS firmware for performing the first stage of the NVIDIA GSP initialization.
Alexandre Courbot explained in today’s patch series for NOVA:
“This series is a continuation of my previous RFCs to complete the first step of GSP booting (running the FWSEC-FRTS firmware extracted from the BIOS) on Ampere devices. While it is still far from bringing the GPU into a state where it can do anything useful, it sets up the basic layout of the driver upon which we can build in order to continue with the next steps of GSP booting, as well as supporting more chipsets.
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There is still a bit of unsafe code where it is not desired, notably to transmute byte slices into types that implement FromBytes – this is because support for doing such transmute operations safely are not in the kernel crate yet.”
So it’s important groundwork for establishing the NOVA driver layout and working further on the NVIDIA GPU initialization but remains “far from bringing the GPU into a state where it can do anything useful.” Thus for now NVIDIA Linux users are best off relying on the NVIDIA packaged Linux driver stack with its open-source but out-of-tree kernel driver code. The Nouveau kernel driver effectively has been unmaintained for a while now along with the Nouveau Gallium3D (OpenGL) driver while NVK is continuing to be developed within Mesa for the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver support.
