Nouveau Lights Up The NVIDIA RTX 3060 GPU Open-Source Support

The open-source Nouveau driver's support for the GeForce RTX 30 "Ampere" series remains very limited -- most notably, without any 3D acceleration support -- but now the GA106 GPU can light up for the GeForce RTX 3060.

Since earlier this year has been the very basic Nouveau driver support for Ampere but without 3D acceleration so basically amounts to a kernel mode-setting driver to at least (hopefully) getting the display working nicely. NVIDIA has not yet published the Ampere signed microcode/firmware files necessary for bringing up the engines and get accelerated 3D working.

Then again, even with the GeForce GTX 900 Maxwell graphics cards through RTX 20 "Turing" there is open-source 3D support but rather impractical with not having any working re-clocking support yet for being able to drive the graphics cards at their rated core/memory frequencies and thus stuck to very low boot-time clock frequencies. Additionally, there still is not any suitable Nouveau Vulkan driver or the like. The best open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver support remains with the GeForce GTX 600/700 series for the time being.

With a patch today, GA106 support is added alongside the other Ampere GPUs to the Nouveau DRM kernel driver. The GA106 support is coming now that Red Hat's Ben Skeggs got his hands on a graphics card and with a basic addition can confirm it's working as much as it should at this point. This RTX 3060 support should in turn land for Linux 5.17 but given the Nouveau limitations don't expect much out of it for now.