Nouveau Changes Sent In To DRM-Next For Linux 5.1 - Biggest Update In Several Releases

Ben Skeggs, the Nouveau DRM maintainer employed by Red Hat, has sent in the big batch of open-source NVIDIA driver changes slates for the upcoming Linux 5.1 kernel.

While the Nouveau changes for Linux 5.1 didn't start off being too exciting but just another cycle of mostly mundane changes, in recent days the work has been more eventful with the merging of the HMM bits for Heterogeneous Memory Management.

With the HMM integration, Nouveau on Linux 5.1 is now able to support Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) as stepping closer to Nouveau's open-source NVIDIA GPU compute goals. This SVM/HMM integration allows for mirroring a processes CPU page tables into a GPU channel's page table and keeping them synchronized in order to access the same memory at the same virtual address. This initial support is in place for NVIDIA Pascal GPUs while issues are being resolved for the newer generations of NVIDIA hardware.

These HMM/SVM bits end up making this Nouveau pull request one of the bigger updates in recent times. Nouveau-next 5.1 ends up adding more than four thousand lines of new code while deleting about one thousand lines of existing code. The rest of the changes are mostly fixes. Sadly, nothing new to report on the state of Nouveau re-clocking for Maxwell and newer in order to offer better open-source NVIDIA 3D performance.