Ben Skeggs, a developer at Red Hat, has announced that he will be terminating his participation in the development of the Nouveau project, which focuses on creating a free driver for NVIDIA GPUs. Skeggs, who currently serves as the maintainer of the DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) Nouveau driver, cited personal reasons for his departure from Red Hat. However, the project will not be left without support as two other Red Hat employees, Carol Hearbst and Luda Paul, will continue working on the driver.
Prior to his departure, Skeggs published a significant set of patches, totaling around 14 thousand lines of code. These patches introduce support for the GSP-RM firmware in the Nouveau kernel module. This firmware is utilized in NVIDIA RTX 20+ GPUs to offload GPU initialization and control to a separate GSP microcontroller (GPU System Processor). By adding support for GSP-RM, Nouveau gains the ability to interact with the GPU through firmware conversion instead of direct programming operations. This greatly simplifies the process of adding support for new NVIDIA GPUs by utilizing pre-existing calls for initialization and power management. It is anticipated that GSP-RM support will be incorporated into the Linux 6.7 kernel.