Nova, the in-development successor to nouveau was announced around this time last year, when Red Hat unveiled the open source, Rust-based driver for NVIDIA GPUs. To be provided as a GSP-only driver, Nova aims to decrease the overall complexity of the GPU driver while also supporting a wide range of hardware, starting with RTX 2000 “Turing” and later GPUs.
This doesn't mean that nouveau won't be around after Nova reaches the stable stage. nouveau will exist alongside Nova, giving people the flexibility to pick which driver they want on their system. This will be particularly useful for users of older NVIDIA GPUs.
With that in mind, we have some fresh news to deliver on the development of Nova.
What's Happening: In a pull request (PR) by Danilo Krummrich of Red Hat is the initial nova-core component and project documentation for the Nova driver, which has been submitted for inclusion in the upcoming Linux kernel 6.15 release.
This PR was submitted with the following message:
Hi Dave and Sima,
This is the inital PR for Nova (nova-core).
Besides the nova-core skeleton driver and the initial project documentation, I picked up two firmware patches and one Rust patch (no conflicts expected) as dependency of nova-core.
What to Expect: Although this is a major turning point in Nova's development, what's submitted is still a bare-bones, basic driver that is not meant for general/production use. It is just the first building block of many that will come into the kernel as the driver matures.
Plus, Nova getting into the Linux kernel is still subject to approval from Linus Torvalds and other responsible maintainers. Although, when it does get in, owners of NVIDIA GPUs (myself included) will be closer to having a powerful alternative to both nouveau and the proprietary graphics driver from NVIDIA.
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