• The "Nova" driver for NVIDIA chipsets

    From LWN.net@1337:1/100 to All on Thu Mar 21 07:15:05 2024
    The "Nova" driver for NVIDIA chipsets

    Date:
    Thu, 21 Mar 2024 07:10:14 +0000

    Description:
    Danilo Krummrich has announced the
    existence of the "Nova" project within Red Hat. We just started to work on Nova, a Rust-based GSP-only driver for
    Nvidia GPUs. Nova, in the long term, is intended to serve as the
    successor of Nouveau for GSP-firmware-based GPUs. With Nova we see
    the chance to significantly decrease the
    complexity of the driver compared to Nouveau for mainly two
    reasons. First, Nouveau's historic architecture, especially around
    nvif/nvkm, is rather complicated and inflexible and requires major
    rework to solve certain problems (such as locking hierarchy in VMM
    / MMU code for VM_BIND currently being solved with a workaround)
    and second, with a GSP-only driver there is no need to maintain
    compatibility with pre-GSP code. Besides that, we also want to take the chance to contribute to the
    Rust efforts in the kernel and benefit from from more memory safety
    offered by the Rust programming language. Given that the effort has just begun, it will be a while before this driver
    shows up in a distribution release.

    ======================================================================
    Link to news story:
    https://lwn.net/Articles/966129/


    --- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 (Linux/64)
    * Origin: tqwNet UK HUB @ hub.uk.erb.pw (1337:1/100)