Nouveau Work On Kepler. Optimus, Gets A Falcon

More code was pushed to Nouveau's Linux kernel repository for their open-source DRM graphics driver. There's improvements to NVE0/Kepler, a new Falcon engine base class, and a number of other changes that have piled up.

In the past 12 hours there have been nearly 100 commits re-piled up on top of the current Linux 3.7 kernel state within the Nouveau Kernel Git repository. This work will ultimately be merged into the Linux 3.8 kernel when its merge window is open around the beginning of December.

A lot of the changes just amount to code cleaning and re-factoring, but there are bug-fixes and new work too. This does include Nouveau Z compression support for NV30 and NV40 hardware, i.e. the GeForce 5 and GeForce 6 series. There's also new display/channel object classes for the NV50 generation, color vibrance control support for some of the newer GeForce 500 "Fermi" NVD0 GPUs, support for 10bpc over DisplayPort, and the initial interface for NVIDIA Optimus detection. The Optimus detection interface will eventually be used if the Nouveau driver is to support auto-powerdown of unused GPUs as part of a multi-GPU rendering configuration.

There's also now an initial Falcon (FUC) engine base class implementation. This Falcon engine code eliminates the use of the nouveau_copy base class for modern NVIDIA GPUs. The NVIDIA GeForce 600 "Kepler" NVE0 GPU support then also picked up initial support for the BSP and VP engines, but the support is currently contigent upon some externally-provided FUC firmware files.

Sadly the work pushed last night doesn't have any changes as it pertains to Nouveau GPU re-clocking, which unfortunately is still a mess for this reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA graphics driver.