Ben Skeggs at Red Hat has long been the primary Nouveau DRM kernel driver maintainer for keeping this open-source NVIDIA GPU kernel driver within the mainline kernel going… Throughout all the battles, particularly after the GTX 900 series and later has required signed firmware images for enabling any accelerated GPU support, he’s now resigning from maintaining the driver. Ben Skeggs has contributed to the Nouveau project for more than one dedace – he’s earned references on Phoronix since 2008.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Hours after posting a large patch series for enabling the Nouveau kernel driver to use NVIDIA’s GSP for improving the support for RTX 20/30 series hardware and finally enabling accelerated graphics support on RTX 40 “Ada Lovelace” GPUs, the Red Hat maintainer has resigned from his duties.
Throughout all the battles, particularly after the GTX 900 series and later has required signed firmware images for enabling any accelerated GPU support, he’s now resigning from maintaining the driver.
This is a personal decision that I’ve been mulling over for a number of years now, and I feel that with GSP-RM greatly simplifying support of future HW, and the community being built around NVK, that things are in good hands and this is the right time for me to take some time away to explore other avenues.
I still have a personal system with an RTX 4070, which I’ve been using the nouveau GSP-RM code on for the past couple of weeks, so chances are I’ll be poking my nose in every so often :)
It will be very interesting to see how this plays out considering Ben has been the number one contributor to the Nouveau kernel driver for years while at Red Hat.
Stay tuned to Phoronix to see how the open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver development evolves from this unexpected move.
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Thank you bot for longer TLDR than there is on original post.