Open-Source NVIDIA "Nouveau" CRC Support Ready For Linux 5.9

Stemming from documentation released by NVIDIA last year, the forthcoming Linux 5.9 kernel will feature CRC support on the display side thanks to the development work by Red Hat.

Nouveau CRC support is coming in Linux 5.9 for Fermi and newer. This is about Cyclic Redundancy Checks (CRC) for error detection in the display handling on NVIDIA graphics cards.

NVIDIA hardware supports CRC checks on a per-head and per-frame basis. The capabilities are laid out in this NVIDIA documentation made public last October.

Shortly thereafter, Red Hat's Lyude Paul begun working the CRC support into Nouveau. After going through several rounds of patch review, the code is now queued up for introduction in Linux 5.9.

This isn't as exciting as Nouveau dynamic re-clocking / power management or performance improvements, but at least it's something with not often having Nouveau DRM driver kernel improvements to report on... But, yes, unfortunately there is no re-clocking support yet for Maxwell through Turing with Linux 5.9 or any other big improvements.

The Nouveau CRC support was sent in this morning as part of DRM-Misc-Next as material slated for Linux 5.9 when the merge window opens up in August. This pull also introduces managed vRAM helpers to DRM core, various TTM changes, and work on the smaller drivers.