Sadly there isn't much to report on at this time around improved open-source "Nouveau" driver support for the recent GeForce RTX 20 and RTX 30 series while even the GTX 900 and GTX 1000 series graphics processors are in poor shape for this unofficial driver. But when it comes to the aging GeForce 200 series, select models there are finally seeing OpenGL ES 3.1 supported by this open-source driver.

Open-source "Nouveau" driver developers have been working on at least partial support for OpenGL compute within the NV50 Gallium3D driver that is used by the NVIDIA GeForce 8 series through GeForce 300 series graphics cards.

With Linux 5.11 there is open-source Nouveau KMS support for Ampere GPUs -- just kernel mode-setting without any form of 3D acceleration. The actual hardware acceleration requires more work and also NVIDIA to release the necessary signed firmware binaries. With Linux 5.12 there still is no 3D acceleration but a big set of patches was merged as a step in that direction.

Following NVIDIA RTX 30 open-source mode-setting support in Linux 5.11, the batch of feature changes slated for the Linux 5.12 kernel have now been submitted to DRM-Next.

Patches were sent out today that provide the open-source Linux kernel "Nouveau" driver with support for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series "Ampere" graphics cards. But at the moment there is no 3D acceleration and the developers are blocked still by signed firmware requirements, so it's basically just a matter of having kernel mode-setting display support.

The open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Gallium3D code within Mesa has wired up DRM shim support for basically faking the support in the absence of real hardware. This is mainly useful for testing the Nouveau OpenGL shader compiler code path without any actual code execution.

The open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver in Linux 5.11 didn't see any exciting features but there is now a patch pending for this DRM driver so it will at least handle mini DisplayPort connections properly.

Covered back in February was work for Nouveau's NVC0 Gallium3D driver to finalle make use of the Mesa on-disk shader cache functionality for speeding up game load times by allowing previously compiled GLSL shaders to be cached to disk. That work by Red Hat has finally been mainlined in Mesa 20.3.

With basically at the cut-off for new feature material wanting to get into DRM-Next for Linux 5.9, Nouveau DRM maintainer Ben Skeggs of Red Hat today sent in the primary feature pull.

Stemming from documentation released by NVIDIA last year, the forthcoming Linux 5.9 kernel will feature CRC support on the display side thanks to the development work by Red Hat.

The open-source Nouveau kernel driver has supported Volta GPUs for some time and since Linux 5.6 also supported open-source initialization of Turing GPUs for hardware acceleration. But missing for Volta and Turing has been the Mesa-side support for enabling 3D (OpenGL) and compute (OpenCL) functionality on these newer GPUs. That is finally changing with pending Mesa patches.

There hasn't been too much to report on the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" kernel driver in some time since the enabling of Turing and no apparent progress on re-clocking to allow the graphics cards to hit their rated clock frequencies (the longstanding, number one limitation for this open-source driver), but some changes were sent in today for the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel merge window.

While waiting to see NVIDIA's new open-source play and ultimately how the re-clocking situation will get addressed for Nouveau so modern GeForce GPUs can work at their intended frequencies on this open-source Linux graphics driver stack, at least the display support has been getting into a more reliable state with CRC support on the horizon as a result of NVIDIA's already published documentation.

ASUS has released a new budget graphics card that could actually be great for those wanting to use the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver stack on Linux.

Last week there were a bunch of new improvements and features for the open-source kernel graphics/display drivers merged for Linux 5.7. There were not any feature changes on the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver front while this week at least are some fixes/workarounds so it's less buggy for some hardware.

As written about last week, in the works for the Linux 5.7 kernel this spring is open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" acceleration for the GeForce 16 series. That code is currently sitting in the Nouveau development tree until landing in DRM-Next for Linux 5.7, but NVIDIA has now posted the necessary firmware binaries needed for enabling the hardware acceleration on these Turing GPUs.

While the open-source Intel and Radeon OpenGL drivers within Mesa have long employed an on-disk shader cache to help with game load times by being able to load previously compiled shaders from disk, the Nouveau "NVC0" Gallium3D driver is on the heels of finally seeing similar support.

With the big Linux 5.6 kernel on the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver side there is finally accelerated support for the GeForce RTX 2000 "Turing" graphics cards (when paired with binary-only microcode). With that initial cut support is no GeForce 16 series Turing support, but that is now on-deck for Linux 5.7.

Now that the merge window is over for Linux 5.6, where the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver managed GeForce RTX 2000 "Turing" series accelerated support, a new feature addition landed Monday in the Nouveau kernel development tree for the next cycle.

Red Hat's Karol Herbst spoke at the FOSDEM 2020 conference in Brussels on the state of the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Linux graphics driver stack.

Here is another big feature coming for Linux 5.6: the Nouveau driver will have initial accelerated support for NVIDIA "Turing" GPUs! This is coming at long-last with NVIDIA set to release publicly the Turing firmware images needed for hardware initialization.

Shortly before Christmas were a couple open-source Nouveau driver patches volleyed by NVIDIA. Some of that work is now queuing in the Nouveau DRM tree ahead of the Linux 5.6 merge window.

For the imminent Linux 5.5 kernel cycle we have talked about exciting AMD Radeon and Intel graphics driver changes on deck from Navi OverDrive overclocking to more Intel Tiger Lake and Jasper Lake bits, AMDGPU HDCP support, and other features queued. But what about the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Linux driver?

Going back to December 2017 we've been tracking the Red Hat led effort on improving Nouveau's OpenCL compute support that involves adding NIR/SPIR-V support and improvements to the Clover Gallium3D state tracker. To much surprise, this morning the SPIR-V support for this open-source NVIDIA driver was merged for Mesa 19.3.

While NVIDIA doesn't contribute much open-source Linux driver code as it concerns their desktop GPUs (though they have been ramping up documentation), when it comes to Tegra/embedded is where they have contributed improvements and new hardware support to Nouveau and associated driver code in the past several years. NVIDIA's open-source Tegra/embedded contributions come as a result of customer demand/requirements. Their latest work is preparing to finally bring-up the "GV11B" Volta graphics found within last year's Tegra Xavier SoC.

While NVIDIA recently began publishing more hardware documentation, don't expect it to make an immediate difference in the quality of the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver. Today the pull request was sent to DRM-Next of the Nouveau kernel driver changes for the upcoming Linux 5.4 cycle and there isn't much to get excited about.

With last week's big DRM pull request for Linux 5.3 that brought Navi support most notably on the AMD side while Intel received HDR display support, continued Icelake/Gen11 work, and more, there weren't any changes to the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver. It was another unfortunate cycle of no major improvements for the Nouveau driver but at least sent out today were a set of new "fixes" for this driver that remains crippled on Maxwell GPUs and newer.

Building off the initial Turing mode-setting bits that were in place since Linux 5.0 and have continued stepping along to support newer variants on successive kernel releases, the Linux 5.3 kernel is slated to add support for the TU116 graphics processor.

If you are a user of the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" Linux graphics driver on laptops and have found no audio support, that is likely to be fixed by an upcoming kernel patch that should make its way to the Linux 5.3 kernel.

An updated firmware configuration should help some GeForce GTX 1000 "Pascal" users with their limited open-source driver support, but the situation remains a mess. Besides the fact of being binary blobs, it's more complicated this time around with the interfaces changing for what is expected by the Nouveau DRM kernel driver.