NVIDIA engineers continue working a lot on the in-development and in-tree open-source Nova kernel driver for their GPUs. Sent out on Friday night were the Turing enablement patches for this Rust-written Nova-Core driver code.

Timur Tabi of NVIDIA sent out a set of 11 patches working on Turing support for Nova. The several hundred lines of new Rust code complements the Ampere hardware support already in Nova-Core and other NVIDIA GPU generations in the works. As noted previously with Nova, it's designed around the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) usage with its firmware blobs for doing much of the heavy lifting.

Timur Tabi explained of this NVIDIA Turing support for the open-source Nova driver in [1]the patch series :

"This patch set adds basic support for pre-booting GSP-RM on Turing.

There is also partial support for GA100, but it's currently not fully implemented. GA100 is considered experimental in Nouveau, and so it hasn't been tested with NovaCore either.

That latest linux-firmware.git is required because it contains the Generic Bootloader image that has not yet been propogated to distros."

NVIDIA [2]Turing as a reminder is the GeForce 16 and GeForce 20 series plus various Quadro and Tesla GPUs as well. Turing is the oldest generation with the NVIDIA GSP.

The open-source Nova driver remains under active development and thus for now end-users should either be using the official NVIDIA Linux driver stack or the existing Nouveau driver code that does support GSP usage as well for Turing.



[1] https://lore.kernel.org/rust-for-linux/20251114233045.2512853-1-ttabi@nvidia.com/

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Turing