Nouveau Has Some Re-Clocking Improvements, But Still No GTX 900 Acceleration

David Airlie has pulled the Nouveau DRM driver changes into his DRM-Next tree, which will then end up in Linux 4.4 within the next few days.

Sadly, Nouveau is still waiting on NVIDIA to release the signed firmware files for Maxwell GPUs so that this open-source driver can move ahead in offering GeForce GTX 900 series hardware-accelerated support. That has yet to happen even though this has been an ongoing situation for one year.

What Nouveau does have for Linux 4.4 are more GK20A (Tegra K1's Kepler GPU) improvements courtesy of NVIDIA, improved PGOB detection and GK107 support, interface changes so that user-space can start taking advantage of the big Nouveau driver rework that initially landed in Linux 4.3, Kepler GDDR5 PLL stability improvements, G8x/GT2xx memory clocking improvements, support for PWM voltage controllers, and other work.

This latest Nouveau DRM code enables re-clocking for the GDDR3-based graphics cards from the G94 through G200, but the testing has been rather limited. The GDDR5 PLL stability fix from Karol Herbst and will fix some of the Kepler memory-related re-clocking woes. More on that via Experimental Nouveau DRM Branch Yields Better GDDR5 Kepler Re-Clocking. More information on the non-GPIO PWM voltage work can be found via Nouveau Gets A Few Patches Regarding Voltage Control.

A list of all the changes for the Nouveau Linux 4.4 merge window can be found via this Git branch.