Ben Skeggs formerly of Red Hat who had been the maintainer of the Nouveau Linux kernel driver for reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA driver support had joined NVIDIA last year and continued his engagements with the open-source Linux community. For ending out April there’s a big surprise… The NVIDIA engineer posted a set of 60 patches enabling support for NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell GPUs atop the open-source Nouveau kernel driver.
While the Rust-written NOVA driver is looked at as the future of upstream, open-source NVIDIA GPU support in the Linux kernel, it’s simply not ready yet. So while NOVA is effectively the successor to the Nouveau kernel driver, for the near-term at least the Nouveau driver will continue sticking around for new hardware — plus an indefinite future with older NVIDIA GPUs that lack the GPU System Processor (GSP) with NOVA only supporting Turing GPUs and newer.
The patch series posted overnight light up the Hopper and Blackwell GPUs with the Nouveau kernel driver. Plus with this enablement being done using the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) and NVIDIA’s signed firmware files, the enablement isn’t too great and there will be similar GSP re-use by the NOVA driver.
Ben Skeggs posted the set of 60 patches alongside the tentative GSP-RM firmware from the NVIDIA 570 series driver. These patches work on enabling the open-source kernel driver for the NVIDIA GH100 Hopper GPUs, GB10x Blackwell GPUs, and GB20x Blackwell GPUs. Thousands of lines of Nouveau driver code were refactored as part of this enablement.
See this patch series for that enablement work around the Nouveau driver for NVIDIA Blackwell and Hopper hardware.
