At the end of April was the open-source surprise of NVIDIA posting Nouveau Linux driver patches for their Hopper and Blackwell GPUs. This comes to complement their official (open-source but out of tree) kernel driver support for these newer NVIDIA GPUs and in the absence of the modern Rust-based NOVA Linux kernel driver not being in working shape yet on the mainline kernel. An updated version of these Nouveau driver patches for NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell GPUs were posted overnight.
These Nouveau driver patches the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) and firmware for initialization and all the heavy-lifting, similar to other NVIDIA GPU generations since Turing. This eases in the open-source driver enablement and also code/functionality re-use across the Nouveau, NOVA, and official NVIDIA Linux drivers.
The patches remain focused on the GH100, GB10x, and B20x graphics processors. This second revision to the patches adapts to SPDX headers on the source files and makes some code adjustments/fixes based upon code review from the initial patches.
Those interested in these updated Nouveau driver patches for Blackwell and Hopper can find them via the mailing list where they are now undergoing their newest round of review. Based on the timing of these v2 patches and the Linux v6.16 merge window already coming up at the end of May, this support isn’t expected to make it into this next version of the kernel but perhaps we’ll see it all settled by the autumn kernel releases.
