- Red Hat engineers have stepped up to deliver some patches for Nvidia Nouveau drivers for the upcoming Linux kernel 5.20 release.
- The patch consists of very few changes; those changes will be almost unnoticeable for standard Linux users.
- Nvidia Nouveau driver is one of the open-source alternatives for official Nvidia drivers for Linux-based operating systems.
The open-source graphics driver software for Linux-based operating systems, Nouveau, is going to receive some updates in the next version of the Linux kernel, 5.20. The treatment comes from Red Hat engineers and promises a few changes; mostly unnoticeable for the standard Linux users.
Maintained by Red Hat engineers
The Red Hat engineers’ (Ben Skeggs, Lyude Paul, and David Airlie) work on the Nouveau driver for Linux kernel 5.20 consists of some code removals for cleaning up, class handling for NV50 GPUs (GeForce 8, 9, 100, 200, and 300 series and some Quadro cards of same generations), and some improvements in low-level code for display functions. Those changes will not deliver noticeable differences; they are under-the-hood changes.
Nouveau driver is created by reverse-engineered Nvidia drivers since the company did not provide open-source drivers for Linux users before. However, Nvidia took the first steps by providing open-source GPU kernel modules in recent months.
The biggest problem with the Nouveau drivers has been the incapability of changing the clock speeds after the boot process; the GPUs start by running at minimum clock speeds, then they should be set to optimal clock speeds as the operating system completes its boot. However, the clock speeds remained the same after completing the boot process with Nouveau drivers, which results in a huge performance loss on the GPUs.