Nouveau Work On The Fermi Scripting Engine

Supreet Pal Singh has provided an in-depth overview of his X.Org EVoC project for providing a Fermi scripting engine for the Nouveau driver that will allow for safe and dynamic GPU core / video memory re-clocking on modern NVIDIA GPUs.

In May I wrote about the X.Org EVoC projects for better Nouveau GPU re-clocking. These "Endless Vacation of Code" projects are being funded by the X.Org Foundation so that the student developers can work on these tasks to improve the open-source reverse-engineered NVIDIA driver.

Supreet Pal Singh is the developer working on a scripting engine for FUC to control PDAEMON for better re-clocking support on Fermi and Kepler graphics hardware. PDAEMON is a micro-controller introduced first in the GeForce 200 series that is fed by the FUC ISA. The scripting support will make it easy to program the PDAEMON rather than programming FUC directly.

He'll be making PDAEMON software improvements, scripting capabilities for the FUC, imtegrate PDAEMON code into the Linux kernel for safe engine re-clocking, and then move to testing and ensuring this code is working out for a range of hardware. He hopes to end with sane, automatic re-clocking of the NVIDIA GPUs using PDAEMON.

The re-clocking support will allow the Nouveau driver to perform much better for 3D/OpenGL/OpenCL workloads while drop back to a lower power state when idling or with minimal use in order to conserve power use, etc. See Nouveau Reclocking: Buggy, But Can Boost Performance.

Supreet has written at length about his plans on the Turbans and Terminals blog.