Nouveau Display CRC Support Being Firmed Up Thanks To NVIDIA's Documentation

While waiting to see NVIDIA's new open-source play and ultimately how the re-clocking situation will get addressed for Nouveau so modern GeForce GPUs can work at their intended frequencies on this open-source Linux graphics driver stack, at least the display support has been getting into a more reliable state with CRC support on the horizon as a result of NVIDIA's already published documentation.

Lyude Paul of Red Hat has been working on the CRC support for the Nouveau driver for Fermi GF119 hardware and later for error detection. This is for supporting Cyclic Redundancy Checks (CRC) for error detection within the display handling. Towards the end of last year NVIDIA published the CRC display programming documentation as part of their open-source GPU document collection and since then Lyude has been working on adding the support to the Nouveau display code in making it more robust.

Lyude this week sent out the latest patches in cleaning up the code for CRC support in Nouveau. More details within this patch series. As part of this patch series is also a new interface for being able to scheduling work that will happen following a particular vblank sequence.

Hopefully this CRC support will be ready in time for Linux 5.8 this summer. CRC support is far from being an exciting feature, but hopefully we'll see more interesting work in the months ahead.