RFC Patches Posted For Rust-Written NVIDIA "Nova" GPU Driver

Red Hat engineers have been developing Nova as a new, Rust-written open-source NVIDIA kernel graphics driver as the eventual successor to the Nouveau kernel driver and is designed around NVIDIA's GPU System Processor (GSP) thus making the driver relevant for RTX 20 / Turing GPUs and newer. Today they posted a request for comments (RFC) patch series of the Nova driver and Rust DRM abstractions.

Danilo Krummrich of Red Hat today posted the RFC patch series of new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) Rust language abstractions and a stub implementation of the Nova GPU driver. Danilo commented in the patch series cover letter:

"Nova is intended to be developed upstream, starting out with just a stub driver to lift some initial required infrastructure upstream."

These Rust abstractions and stubbed out implementation of the Nova driver come in currently at 1.7k lines of code but will obviously grow greatly in size as the Nova driver is developed and actually made into a working NVIDIA kernel graphics driver.

The Nova driver continues to be developed in this FreeDesktop.org repository for those wishing to track its progress.

The RFC patches are now out for review/comment on the kernel mailing list.