News: 0001649281

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Nouveau Patch For Linux 7.3 Allows For NVK Vulkan Video Atop NVIDIA NVDEC

([Nouveau] 6 Hours Ago Linux 7.3)


This week's round of drm-misc-next patches for staging ahead of the Linux 7.3 kernel merge window bring an exciting change for the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver.

Ready for introduction in the Linux 7.3 merge window is a Nouveau kernel driver patch by Red Hat's David Airlie to support allocating NVDEC channgels via the ABI16 interface. This Nouveau kernel driver change to support NVIDIA video decoding (NVDEC) channel allocations in turn will be used by the Mesa NVK driver for Vulkan Video.

There is [1]this pending Mesa merge request dependent upon the Nouveau kernel driver patch. Initially the NVK driver will advertise H.264 video decoding with Vulkan Video. There is work toward H.265 Vulkan Video support too but that is currently wedging the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP).

This Nouveau+NVK Vulkan Video support is targeting NVIDIA Turing GPUs and latter in being dependent upon the NVIDIA GSP firmware support and thus older (pre-Turing) NVIDIA GPUs will not be supported. With this patch now part of drm-misc-next for Linux 7.3, hopefully it won't be long before that Vulkan Video H.264 NVK support at least will be merged.

[2]This pull request carries that patch along with a few other small Direct Rendering Manager driver patches for the week. The Linux 7.3 merge window is kicking off during the back half of August.



[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/31867

[2] https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/a734faaf-4f77-48ce-a354-a1011524c949@linux.intel.com/


Even if we put all these nagging thoughts [four embarrassing questions about
astrology] aside for a moment, one overriding question remains to be asked.
Why would the positions of celestial objects at the moment of birth have an
effect on our characters, lives, or destinies? What force or influence,
what sort of energy would travel from the planets and stars to all human
beings and affect our development or fate? No amount of scientific-sounding
jargon or computerized calculations by astrologers can disguise this central
problem with astrology -- we can find no evidence of a mechanism by which
celestial objects can influence us in so specific and personal a way. . . .
Some astrologers argue that there may be a still unknown force that represents
the astrological influence. . . .If so, astrological predictions -- like those
of any scientific field -- should be easily tested. . . . Astrologers always
claim to be just a little too busy to carry out such careful tests of their
efficacy, so in the last two decades scientists and statisticians have
generously done such testing for them. There have been dozens of well-designed
tests all around the world, and astrology has failed every one of them. . . .
I propose that we let those beckoning lights in the sky awaken our interest
in the real (and fascinating) universe beyond our planet, and not let them
keep us tied to an ancient fantasy left over from a time when we huddled by
the firelight, afraid of the night.
-- Andrew Fraknoi, Executive Officer, Astronomical Society of the Pacific,
"Why Astrology Believers Should Feel Embarrassed," San Jose Mercury
News, May 8, 1988