Nouveau Kernel Driver Changes For Supporting NVK Vulkan Submitted To DRM-Next

The Nouveau DRM kernel driver changes for new user-space APIs to be used by the Mesa NVK open-source Vulkan driver have now been submitted for pulling to DRM-Next from the current drm-misc-next queue. These Nouveau kernel driver additions for NVK in turn will then premiere with the upcoming Linux 6.6 cycle.

Last week the NVK Vulkan driver was merged to Mesa 23.3 Git with the expectation that the Nouveau user-space API additions are set and ready for the mainline Linux kernel. The patches for the new uAPIs were added to drm-misc-next and now this morning sent to DRM-Next via the weekly pull request.

This pull request has the Nouveau changes for the new ioctls and VM_BIND interface for tracking virtual memory with the GPU VA manager and enabling Vulkan sparse binding and residency support by the Mesa NVK driver.

While exciting that the Nouveau kernel driver in Linux 6.6 will have these additions for NVK Vulkan, there isn't the pull yet for adding the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) support for modernizing the Nouveau kernel driver use and getting RTX 40 series acceleration going. Until that GSP transition is complete and re-clocking / power management in good shape, the Nouveau driver for OpenGL and Vulkan use will remain painfully slow. Hopefully though that Nouveau GSP support will be all ironed out shortly.