The "Nova" driver for NVIDIA chipsets

Danilo Krummrich has announced theexistence of the "Nova" project within Red Hat.

We just started to work on Nova, a Rust-based GSP-only driver forNvidia GPUs. Nova, in the long term, is intended to serve as thesuccessor of Nouveau for GSP-firmware-based GPUs.

With Nova we see the chance to significantly decrease thecomplexity of the driver compared to Nouveau for mainly tworeasons. First, Nouveau's historic architecture, especially aroundnvif/nvkm, is rather complicated and inflexible and requires majorrework to solve certain problems (such as locking hierarchy in VMM/ MMU code for VM_BIND currently being solved with a workaround)and second, with a GSP-only driver there is no need to maintaincompatibility with pre-GSP code.

Besides that, we also want to take the chance to contribute to theRust efforts in the kernel and benefit from from more memory safetyoffered by the Rust programming language.

Given that the effort has just begun, it will be a while before this drivershows up in a distribution release.