The Big Nouveau Rework Will Indeed Land For Linux 4.3

A few days ago I wrote about the open-source NVIDIA kernel driver going through a big rework and now that code has been queued up into DRM-Next for Linux 4.3.

Ben Skeggs of Red Hat who maintains the Nouveau DRM driver explained the work in the commit, "Beyond correcting some not-so-great design decisions and making the code a lot easier to work with, there's not much exciting (lower memory usage, GPU VM should be a lot faster, etc) to be gained by the end-user as a result of the cleanup, it mostly lays the groundwork for future improvements."

There's also Tegra X1 (GM20B) graphics support, perfmon work, support for GT200 re-clocking and other power management improvements, Maxwell DisplayPort fixes, random fixes, and support for NVIDIA external firmware as mentioned in my article earlier in the week. However, I have yet to see NVIDIA publish this signed Maxwell firmware/microcode anywhere yet.

After Linux 4.2 didn't bring any Nouveau changes, I'm looking forward to testing this big driver rework in Linux 4.3.