As a consequence of NVIDIA opening up their driver code last year and reorganizing how their GPU firmware works for GTX 16/RTX 20 (Turing) and newer GPUs, nouveau has been revitalized as a project and last week patches for support for the new firmware have been posted. This will make the NVIDIA proprietary driver essentially superfluous for most people, since nouveau will have access to the full capabilities of the hardware just like the proprietary one through using the exact same firmware.
We should have this backported for openSUSE Leap 15.6 and also tweak it so we use this new stuff by default for Turing+ GPUs (GTX 16, RTX 20, RTX 30, RTX 40) instead of just Ada+ GPUs (RTX 40).
Waiting for feedback from Stefan Dirsch
Well, this is for improving support of the nouveau kernel driver. I talked with Takashi about that and how to integrate it. It won't replace nvidia's openGPU kernel driver that fast, let alone nvidia's proprietary kernel driver. And all this doesn't touch the userspace needed for nVidia at all.
We could consider make the openGPU driver for Turing/Amperer and later the default, since we ship it now. Unfortunately it's still considered Beta and it would be a brave decisions to use it by default now. OTOH using current nouveau driver by default, which in many cases just causes a black screen, has been brave as well. ;-)
The userspace side of this requires updated Mesa and shipping NVK.
As it stands today, Nouveau is our default, and the changes in Nouveau upstream over the past year (culminating the linked patch set) results in a tremendous improvement for the out of the box user experience.
Well, NVK won't get into Mesa before 23.3 (as an experimental driver). And I doubt we still get Mesa 23.3 in time for Leap 15.6. Also I don't know the plans if we still want to apply these massive patch fore our Leap 15.6 kernel. But in general I agree that it isn't probably the best idea to have a default on a driver, which requires 3rd party userspace. Of course, llvmpipe should work as fallback though. But with NVK later (and zink on top of that for OpenGL support?) it would be a good path for the future.
I believe the regular OpenSL stuff in Mesa has already been updated too, so zink isn't strictly required.
I mean for the new NVK driver. Or do they plan Vulkan and OpenGL driver for this new stuff?
Currently, yes. Longer term, I believe the plan is to consolidate as much of the hardware OpenGL drivers onto Vulkan through Zink.
Metadata Update from @lkocman: - Issue set to the milestone: 16.0 (was: 15.6)
Yes, but this is very long term. ;-)
Thank you Stefan!
Well, Mesa 23.3 released this week, and the improved Nouveau was merged for Linux 6.7, so can we look into bringing this to Leap 15.6?
And now Mesa 24.0 exists with the new NVK providing good support for this hardware, can we look into this?
I think that this is Leap 16.0 material. So does suggest the selected milestone.
Yes, this will be for factory/SLE16. We need to enable Kernel support and then Mesa as well. I think it's still not default in Mesa. I can do this once I update to Mesa 24.0.x.
We still plan to Mesa 23.3.5 for Leap 15.6/SP6.
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