Red Hat's Long, Rust'ed Road Ahead For Nova As Nouveau Driver Successor

[intelfx]

I wonder how this can be leveraged by other OSes than Linux

It cannot.

Being written in Rust will be a problem point for those C kernel that have no Rust support in kernel. Wish they would have gone with well written C for OS compatibility.

This is a Linux driver, written by people that are interested in improving Linux, in a language that is relevant for Linux. Why on Earth should some other OS compatibility it be their problem?

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

I'm imagining for example Ubuntu installer with a window "please select driver for your GPU" and 3 options with brief explanation, like its character race selection in RPG, with each pros and cons. Nightmare

Why on earth do you think the user would need to choose, especially on Ubuntu? Detecting the card generation and "doing the right thing" isn't that hard. And Ubuntu can just continue using the proprietary driver, their NVIDIA support is actually pretty good.

[pharmasolin]

Why on earth do you think the user would need to choose, especially on Ubuntu? Detecting the card generation and "doing the right thing" isn't that hard. And Ubuntu can just continue using the proprietary driver, their NVIDIA support is actually pretty good.

Because if you are on latest hardware you will have an option with close sourced, nvk, noveau = 3 drivers. What to install by default for user? If he is gamer? If he will use cuda or video editing software?

[scottishduck]

Because if you are on latest hardware you will have an option with close sourced, nvk, noveau = 3 drivers. What to install by default for user? If he is gamer? If he will use cuda or video editing software?

Nvk and nouveau are the same thing. So only options are still closed or open.

[cend]

What's the issue with Maxwell/Pascal reclocking support? Last time I heard of it, that's still a major TODO.

[X_m7]

What's the issue with Maxwell/Pascal reclocking support? Last time I heard of it, that's still a major TODO.

Those cards need signed firmware for power management, unlike Kepler and older where Nouveau has some custom firmware that it can upload to the GPU, but unlike Turing and newer that firmware isn't as self contained as the GSP firmware so it can't handle reclocking by itself.

In short, it's the worst of both worlds for those cards, and I wouldn't expect the situation to change for them anytime soon, or ever.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Because if you are on latest hardware you will have an option with close sourced, nvk, noveau = 3 drivers. What to install by default for user? If he is gamer? If he will use cuda or video editing software?

Sorry, I see what you were getting at. I think the reality will just be a continuation of what we see today. Distros that have strict policies about not shipping / installing closed source drivers by default will continue to do so, and will default to the best open source driver / user space option for a given generation of NVIDIA GPU (Nouveau or Nova). E.g. Fedora and OpenSUSE. Distros like Pop!_OS will still load the closed source driver from NVIDIA (it's even loaded within the installer which is handy).

[CommunityMember]

Those cards need signed firmware for power management, unlike Kepler and older where Nouveau has some custom firmware that it can upload to the GPU, but unlike Turing and newer that firmware isn't as self contained as the GSP firmware so it can't handle reclocking by itself.

In short, it's the worst of both worlds for those cards, and I wouldn't expect the situation to change for them anytime soon, or ever.

Likely never. The enterprise users, who are both directly, and indirectly, paying for this work care about Turing and later (mostly later, but Turing uses a common framework of GSP firmware so it gets to be included). There should be nothing to stop an interested party from taking the time to reverse engineer Maxwell/Pascal, but it is something which would require a lot of effort. And large unfunded efforts tend to never get accomplished. The only hope might be if nvidia itself had their lawyers review necessary codes and were able to clear it for publication. However, unlike with Turing and later in the Linux kernel there would seem to be little benefit to Nvidia to make that investment (and certainly no large sales of such GPUs).

[Vermilion]

I'm imagining for example Ubuntu installer with a window "please select driver for your GPU" and 3 options with brief explanation, like its character race selection in RPG, with each pros and cons. Nightmare

Because if you are on latest hardware you will have an option with close sourced, nvk, noveau = 3 drivers. What to install by default for user? If he is gamer? If he will use cuda or video editing software?

That's no different than Linux detecting whether you have an AMD or NVIDIA card, then loading the appropriate driver. Distros come with predefined defaults, and users are free to set up alternatives. Also, you're mixing up kernel and userspace drivers.

[cend]

Those cards need signed firmware for power management, unlike Kepler and older where Nouveau has some custom firmware that it can upload to the GPU, but unlike Turing and newer that firmware isn't as self contained as the GSP firmware so it can't handle reclocking by itself.

In short, it's the worst of both worlds for those cards, and I wouldn't expect the situation to change for them anytime soon, or ever.

As the GSP effort did get its way into Linux, though, a similar path for older cards has a very slight chance to work:

1. Buy a freely usable and redistributable documentation for Maxwell, Pascal and Volta's power management firmware from NVIDIA, using crowdfunded money;
2. Let NVIDIA donate said firmware to linux-firmware;
3. The starter of said crowdfunding and other volunteers work out the rest.