NVIDIA engineers continue working a lot on the open-source and upstream Nova driver for the Linux kernel. This modern, Rust-written open-source NVIDIA driver is still taking shape as an alternative to NVIDIA’s official downstream open-source driver and the aging and reverse-engineered Nouveau driver. Out on the horizon for Nova is Hopper and Blackwell GPU support.
NVIDIA engineer John Hubbard is in the process of preparing Hopper and Blackwell GPU generations for being supported by the Nova driver. Another NVIDIA engineer is working on the Turing GPU support. Nova as a reminder is just engineered for recent generations of NVIDIA GPUs supporting the GPU System Processor (GSP).
Hubbard sent out today the initial prerequisites for preparing the Hopper and Blackwell code for Nova-Core. He explained with today’s patch series:
“I’ve based these Hopper/Blackwell prerequisites on top of Joel’s and Alex’s changes, and also on top of my recent boot0/boot42 changes.
This makes it easier for both Timur Tabi to post his Turing support (which he’s about ready to do), and for me to post the actual Hopper/Blackwell support, without generating conflicts.
Testing: This works as expected on Ampere and Blackwell (bare metal), on my local test machine.”
While the Nova driver code is already upstream in the mainline Linux kernel, this Rust DRM driver is being incrementally built out until it evolves into a usable and capable NVIDIA kernel graphics driver. Hopefully in 2026 we see the Nova driver becoming useful to end-users for this newest open-source NVIDIA kernel driver option.
