Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/966129/

Danilo Krummrich has announced the
existence of the “Nova” project within Red Hat.

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

With Nova we see the chance to significantly decrease the
complexity of the driver compared to Nouveau for mainly two
reasons. First, Nouveau’s historic architecture, especially around
nvif/nvkm, is rather complicated and inflexible and requires major
rework 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 maintain
compatibility with pre-GSP code.

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

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