Linux 6.11 To Bring Nouveau NVreg_RegistryDwords Support, Intel NPU Enhancements

Now past the Linux 6.10 merge window, this week brought an initial batch of drm-misc-next changes submitted to the Direct Rendering Manager subsystem's DRM-Next for queuing until the Linux 6.11 merge window opens up in July. The changes this week include a notable addition for the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver and some improvements for the Intel iVPU driver for their Neural Processing Unit (NPU).

On the Nouveau driver side, this week's drm-misc-next pull request has a patch from NVIDIA engineer Timur Tabi. The change is to allow command-line GSP-RM registry support. With the "NVreg_RegistryDwords" command line parameter now, additional registry keys can be sent to the GPU System Processor GSP-RPM. The NVreg_RegistryDwords registry bits can be useful for fine-tuning configurations, debugging, and "experimenting" with behavior. These keys are passed directly to the GSP-RM without handling by the Nouveau driver.

The NVIDIA proprietary driver supports the NVreg_RegistryDwords module option as well and has been used by NVIDIA GeForce Linux gamers for manipulating performance levels, brightness controls, and overriding other options that are handled by the GPU System Processor. Having this NVreg_RegistryDwords support for the Nouveau driver should help for similar situations when using RTX 20 series and newer GPUs with GSP firmware support activated.

Over on the IVPU accelerator driver side for the Intel NPU support on Linux, there is now hardware scheduler support, profiling support, and improved platform support layer handling. This work was previously talked about in the more versatile CPU and NPU handling article. The Intel NPU hardware scheduler and profiling support had been intended for the Linux v6.10 kernel but didn't ultimately get merged in time and thus now is coming for Linux 6.11. Great ongoing IVPU/NPU improvements by Intel for Linux.

The drm-misc-next pull also now allows for selecting fonts with the DRM Panic handler. That DRM Panic work is for sort of like a "Blue Screen of Death" on Linux. The initial DRM Panic code was merged for v6.10 but continues to be improved upon and working toward broader driver support.

The full list of DRM-Misc-Next updates for the week can be found via this pull request to DRM-Next. Stay tuned to Phoronix for more coverage of DRM-Next over the weeks ahead as more graphics/display driver feature code gets primed ahead of the Linux 6.11 cycle.