Nouveau Commits: Fermi Reclocking, PM, MXM, Etc

Last week there were a number of commits to the Nouveau DRM kernel tree by Red Hat's Ben Skeggs, several of these commits bring interesting new features and support.

With the Linux 3.2 kernel reaching the end of its development and the merge window for the Linux 3.3 kernel opening in January, it's time for kernel developers to get ready.

The Nouveau kernel tree last week was updated by Ben Skeggs of Red Hat against v3.2-rc5 upstream and then he landed more than 100 Nouveau-related commits into this public tree. (The Nouveau/linux-2.6 Git log.) There's a lot of fixes and other maintenance work, but also a lot of interesting new features that should be making their way into Linux 3.3.

Here are some of the interesting commits that landed last week into the public Nouveau kernel driver tree.

- HDMI audio support for NVA3 through NVD0 chipsets (commit). This HDMI audio support is for graphics cards from the GeForce GT 240 through some GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" GPUs. NVD9 (newer low-end Fermi GPUs) HDMI audio support is still being hacked on.

- Nouveau fan-speed management. There's support for manipulating the fan speeds on most NVIDIA graphics cards of recent generations by writing values to a sysfs interface. The support, however, isn't dynamic by default due to concerns of the code going awry and potentially damaging the graphics card if overheating the GPU core or other problems. This support is for the NV40 (GeForce 6) series and newer (commit).

- NVD0 page-flipping support (commit). Earlier NVIDIA GPUs have already had Nouveau KMS page-flipping support. There's also many other NVD0-related commits that were pushed six days ago.

- Hotplug IRQ support (commit).

- There's several commits concerning NVIDIA MXM support, which is the mobile graphics module that NVIDIA uses for many notebooks.

- Memory type detection for several generations of NVIDIA GPUs (commit). Now the driver knows if the graphics card is using DDR1/DDR2/GDDR3/GDDR5/etc video memory.

- The feature I've personally been waiting on: initial NVC0 Fermi re-clocking support (commit). At long last for the GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" graphics cards (though not the newer NVDx parts) there is support for adjusting the engine clocks.

Plus there's plenty of other work going on. Stay tuned for the Linux 3.3 kernel DRM pull request in a few weeks.