The "Nova" driver for NVIDIA chipsets

Posted Mar 22, 2024 23:19 UTC (Fri) by swilmet (subscriber, #98424)
Parent article: The "Nova" driver for NVIDIA chipsets

Re-reading Christian Schaller's blog post Why the open source driver release from NVIDIA is so important for Linux? (2022) (he is a manager of the desktop team at Red Hat):

The plan we are working towards from our side, but which is likely to take a few years to come to full fruition, is to come up with a way for the NVIDIA binary driver and Mesa to share a kernel driver.

It is unclear to me if Nova is a concerted effort between Nvidia, Red Hat and maybe other companies. Or if it's just Red Hat.

Note also (from above blog post again):

The linux kernel does not allow multiple drivers for the same hardware, so in order for a new NVIDIA kernel driver to go in the current one will have to go out or at least be limited to a different set of hardware.

So it *seems* that in the future: (1) Nouveau will be for older hardware, and Nova for newer hardware and (2) Nova will be a kernel driver in common between Mesa and the binary Nvidia userspace support. That would make sense.

The "Nova" driver for NVIDIA chipsets

Posted Mar 25, 2024 10:17 UTC (Mon) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

Do Linux kernel people approve of kernel changes that exist to enable binary user-space driver blobs?

The "Nova" driver for NVIDIA chipsets

Posted Mar 26, 2024 11:58 UTC (Tue) by MarcB (subscriber, #101804) [Link]

This seems overly optimistic (also two years passed) and I doubt Nvidia sees it that way.

My understanding is that the interface between Nvidia's kernel driver and their user space driver is not stable at all, it can change in any minor release and most likely is shared to some degree with their Windows driver.

Also, the clear focus of Nvidia's open kernel driver are compute applications - which is what they really care about in Linux. Graphics have very low priority.

I don't think the two stacks will ever share anything.