Linux Graphics: "Nova" Driver for NVIDIA, wayland-protocols 1.34
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LWN ☛ The "Nova" driver for NVIDIA chipsets
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.
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Free Desktop ☛ wayland-protocols 1.34
wayland-protocols 1.34 is now available.
This release comes with three new staging protocols:
* xdg-toplevel-drag
This protocol enhances regular drag and drop by allowing attaching a toplevel window to a drag. This can be used to implement e.g. detachable toolbars and browser tab drag behavior that can be seen in other platforms.
* xdg-dialog
This protocol allows setting dialog specific hints on a toplevel, more specifically marking them as modal.
* linux-drm-syncobj
This protocol will allow explicit synchronization of buffers using DRM synchronization objects. While being a protocol that is unlikely to be widely used directly by applications and toolkits themselves, it is an important building block for improving Vulkan and OpenGL drivers.
Other than this, the tablet and foreign toplevel list protocols also received clarifications and fixes.