Open-Source NVIDIA/Nouveau Tests On Linux 3.19

After last week delivering initial open-source Radeon DRM driver tests on Linux 3.19, here's similar treatment in testing out the new Linux 3.19 kernel with the Nouveau DRM driver for open-source NVIDIA graphics.

The most user-facing Nouveau DRM driver change for Linux 3.19 is the initial GeForce 900 Maxwell series support as outlined this past weekend it's mode-setting well but doesn't yet provide any hardware acceleration for the new GeForce GTX 970/980 graphics cards.

The Nouveau DRM code in Linux 3.19 also has other internal changes including Tegra K1 voltage support and coherency improvements, GT21x memory re-clocking work, and prep work for some bigger projects that will be merged in the coming releases (hopefully we'll see some more exciting changes land for Linux 3.20).

This isn't the most exciting Nouveau DRM update in recent times, but at least there's a lot of other exciting features to Linux 3.19. For this article I ran some basic Nouveau DRM driver tests on Linux 3.18.0 stable compared to Linux 3.19 Git.

The two graphics cards being tested on the Intel Core i7 5960X rig were a GeForce GTX 680 and GTX 780 Ti, which is a limited selection given not many hugely pressing Nouveau DRM changes this round. On the user-space side was Ubuntu 14.10 upgraded with Mesa 10.5-devel Git and xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.11. The GTX 680 and GTX 780 Ti were both re-clocked to the maximum performance state possible on Nouveau before running into issues (illustrated above): 0a is the highest pstate for these two GPUs as of Linux 3.19.