nvk: the kernel changes needed (UPDATED)
The initial NVK (nouveau vulkan) experimental driver has been merged into mesa master[1], and although there's lots of work to be done before it's application ready, the main reason it was merged was because the initial kernel work needed was merged into drm-misc-next[2] and will then go to drm-next for the 6.6 merge window. (This work is separate from the GSP firmware enablement required for reclocking, that is a parallel development, needed to make nvk useable). Faith at Collabora will have a blog post about the Mesa side, this is more about the kernel journey.
UPDATE
Commentary in LWN:
-
Ekstrand: NVK Has landed
Faith Ekstrand announces on the Collabora blog that NVK, an open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs, will be included in the Mesa 23.3 release.
And the original:
-
NVK Has landed!
As of today, NVK, the new Vulkan driver for Nvidia GPUs, has landed in the main Mesa branch and will be included as an experimental driver in the 23.3 release of Mesa. This is the culmination of over a year of work by myself (Faith Ekstrand) as well as Karol Herbst and Dave Airlie at Red Hat, and about a dozen community contributors. Special thanks also goes to Danilo Krummrich at Red Hat who has been hard at work building Nouveau kernel support for the new memory binding and execution API required by NVK.
What follows is a little Q&A to hopefully answer the most pressing questions people may have about the new driver. If you have other questions, feel free to reach out to me on Mastodon!
Liam Dawe:
-
NVK the open source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA merged into Mesa
Well, it happened! The open source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs named NVK has been officially merged into Mesa. This means it will be available as an experimental option in the Mesa 23.3 release due in a couple of months (not the upcoming 23.2 release). Note: this is not made by NVIDIA directly but various open source devs.