Former Nouveau Lead Developer Joins NVIDIA, Continues Working On Open-Source Driver

Well, this is better news than him being completely gone from driver dev which has been the situation for months now. He formally resigned.

Of course, this may have already been in the works and the reason he left to begin with. Either way, good to see him back.

Things seems about to be in a pretty good spot NVIDIA wise. I do not use any of their recent gear so I do not care directly. That said, it will be good to have NVIDIA working well with Wayland just to remove the substantial amount of noise NVIDIA issues add to that project.

I don't really see why they would hire him to achieve this goal. He had already quit as maintainer. He was out of the picture unless he resigned specifically due to accepting an offer from NVIDIA, but if that was the case and they wanted Nouveau stopped then why is he now contributing a huge patchset? If they hired him and he quit nouveau they could've had him work on the proprietary driver or their own open out of tree kernel driver, but they specifically had him (or at least allowed him) to keep working on nouveau.

Also, if they really wanted to EEE nouveau into oblivion, they would need to get every single prominent nouveau, nova, and NVK developer on payroll simultaneously before they silence them all because once one gets silenced why would any of the others even consider an NVIDIA offer? Especially those already employed at Red Hat? It doesn't really make sense to me as an EEE tactic.

What has been apparent over the past few years is that NVIDIA seems to be relaxing their iron grip on their hardware. They were the only ones who could enable reclocking in such a way that it would be available to a theoretical open source driver and they did exactly that. They moved the functionality they wanted to keep hidden into firmware. They had to have known that doing this would enable nouveau to use it too.

Also, they're hopping on this bandwagon now that NVK is showing promise of being a truly viable gaming and general purpose use driver. Looking at the AMD side of things, they did the same thing back when they first started supporting Mesa directly. They released some documentation, let the community get a minimally viable driver working, and then poured official resources into making it better. I believe the same situation happened with the Freedreno driver, with Qualcomm eventually contributing patches officially. ARM also announced their support of the Panfrost driver for non-Android Linux use cases only after it had been functionally viable for some time. Maybe it's a case of "if you can't beat them, join them" but we've seen companies eventually start helping out on open drivers only after dragging their feet for years several times before.

I have to think that nvidia isn't dumb enough to look around at their competitor's linux support, and look at the reliance on linux for compute in datacenters, and look at their pile of fancy new AI chips that they're going to try to sell to data centers, and think to themselves, "ahh, I know the best move, poach the best nvidia linux dev in the world so that ~2% of gamers are forced to use our proprietary driver!"

My guess is they're doing this to make money on AI, they couldn't care less about linux gaming. If we get an open source driver out of the deal, I won't complain, but I bet the consumer GPU driver has little to do with why they hired him.

What would nvidia gain by making people not develop noveau? Genuinely curious.

I mean, the open source driver already is out. The nouveau driver has been in the kernel for like a decade now. The userspace part has been in Mesa for just as long, though largely was unused due to nouveau not being able to use high clock speeds. That isn't the case anymore, and since the beginning of the year you've been able to test drive the new NVK Vulkan driver on nouveau with GSP enabled to get actually reasonable performance in several select games. NVIDIA isn't creating a new driver, they're contributing to one that already exists. Since this particular patch set is so huge I don't know it will make it into the next kernel release right away but this guy was the former nouveau maintainer, I expect he knows the necessary standards to get his code accepted.