NVIDIA and nouveau [LWN.net]
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The release of source code for NVIDIA graphics hardware was perhaps something of a surprise; at least at a quick glance, it seems like that could lead to an in-tree, officially supported driver. For many years, though, the nouveau project has been working on an upstream driver for NVIDIA hardware, so an obvious question is what happens with nouveau in light of the NVIDIA announcement. Kernel graphics maintainer Dave Airlie gave a talk at the 2022 Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC) to help shed some light on that subject.
He began by giving a brief history of NVIDIA hardware, with a timeline that can be seen in his slides. The timeline was in part "cobbled together from Wikipedia" and is not completely accurate, he said, but shows just "how far back NVIDIA hardware stretches". While the timeline starts in 1999, things started getting interesting in 2006 with the NV50, he said. It introduced the per-context virtual memory addresses; that feature represented a major turning point for graphics hardware.
