Now past the end-of-year holidays, this round of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) fixes for the in-development [1]Linux 6.19 are a bit more meaningful following those light holiday weeks. Sent out today were the DRM fixes for Linux 6.19-rc5 that includes a fix for broken support for newer NVIDIA GPUs on the Nouveau open-source driver.

Today's round of DRM fixes for Linux 6.19-rc5 include a regression fix by David Airlie for the Nouveau driver to not attempt the FWSEC -SB firmware on newer NVIDIA GPU platforms. A change made for the Linux 6.19 kernel and then back-ported to Linux 6.16+ as a "fix" to allocate the FWSEC-SB at boot ended up breaking newer NVIDIA GPU support that doesn't depend upon that path.

That caused breakage on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 "Blackwell" current gneration GPUs at least of [2]freezes at boot time [3]reported by multiple users. I also encountered this issue when trying NVIDIA Blackwell testing on Nouveau with Linux 6.19.

Thankfully David Airlie has this regression fix now ready to go for Linux 6.19-rc5 and is also marked for back-porting to Linux 6.16+ where the problematic patch was also marked for back-porting.

This week's [4]DRM fixes pull also include various open-source NVIDIA Rust "Nova" driver fixes, a fix to the PCI VGA code to avoid multiple GPUs being reported as the boot display, and a number of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver fixes. AMDGPU saw fixes to the analog DC display code, VPE video processing fixes, Clang compiler build fixes, Navi 1x PCIe dynamic power management fixes, ring reset fixes, and other fixes.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Linux+6.19

[2] https://lore.kernel.org/nouveau/59736756-d81b-41bb-84ba-a1b51057cdd4@linux.dev/

[3] https://lore.kernel.org/nouveau/59736756-d81b-41bb-84ba-a1b51057cdd4@linux.dev/

[4] https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/CAPM=9txCYhhEQYMtR-Wborgso86tnPpBv-M=6+v8QVO3Sx197g@mail.gmail.com/