NVIDIA prepares for the next generation with new Nova driver for Boot42

It wasn’t long ago that the US company NVIDIA presented its Blackwell GPUs and launched them on the market. Preparations are now being made for the next NVIDIA architecture so that the launch can be as smooth as possible for Linux users. This is reported by Michael Larabel from Phoronix.

The new architecture is called “Ruby”. With a new patch “[PATCH 0/2] gpu: nova: add boot42 support for next-gen GPUs” of its open-source graphics driver Nova, NVIDIA has already made initial adjustments to make the transition as smooth as possible. The patch notes already refer to support for the next GPU generation. The plan is to switch from Boot0 to Boot42. These boot versions are registers that NVIDIA uses to uniquely identify the respective architecture. As NVIDIA engineer John Hubbard explains, Boot0 (NV_PMC_BOOT_0) is to be abandoned and replaced by Boot42 (NV_PMC_BOOT_42) in order to simplify handling in the future.

NVIDIA GPUs are moving away from using NV_PMC_BOOT_0 to contain architecture and revision details, and will instead use NV_PMC_BOOT_42 in the future. NV_PMC_BOOT_0 will be zeroed out.
Change the selection logic in Nova so that it will claim Turing and later GPUs. This will work for the foreseeable future, without any further code changes here, because all NVIDIA GPUs are considered, from the oldest supported on Linux (NV04), through the future GPUs.

In addition to this change, 33 lines of code have also been removed to reduce the overall size and create a clearer structure.

Also, remove a couple of types: Spec and Revision. That deletes a net total of 33 lines of code and simplifies that area of code. It also simplifies the subsequent boot42 support diffs.

Linux fans can look forward to exciting developments around the Nova driver written in Rust, as work is starting early and it seems that NVIDIA is now taking Linux development more and more seriously as they are already starting to announce it in mailing lists. It will be interesting to see how the whole thing develops in the future.

Source: Phoronix