Nouveau’s Lead Maintainer Reportedly Joins NVIDIA, Developing Open-Source Solutions

Nouveau's lead maintainer of the open-source "Nouveau" linux driver, Ben Skeggs, has reportedly resigned from his position, joining NVIDIA for something much bigger.

For those unaware, Nouveau is an open-source graphic driver designed specifically for NVIDIA. The platform has witnessed tremendous growth over the past year, where not only did it receive NVIDIA GSP firmware support, but multiple developments were completed, including the HDMI 2.1 integration, which is a more notable one. However, it looks like the lead developer of the platform, Ben Skeggs, has decided to part ways with Nouveau's maintenance and has instead started a new journey with NVIDIA.

Interestingly, Nouveau saw 156 patches uploaded after months of inactivity, which also brought enhancements in GSP firmware support and several other features. Ben's NVIDIA work email uploaded the set of patches, which showed that he has "officially" joined the big guns, but neither has he commented on it nor have there been any official announcements.

While we are unaware of the reason for Ben's move here, it might hint that NVIDIA could explore going open-source more extensively this time since the firm has been massively criticized in recent times regarding how its software assets put the open-source community at a disadvantage. Ben's contribution has enabled Nouveau Kernel drivers to become a robust platform for NVIDIA's recent GPU offerings such as RTX 40, RTX 30, and RTX 20 series so we can expect this to continue for future NVIDIA GPUs on the Linux platforms.

So keeping that in mind, it will be interesting to see what sort of developments the former Nouveau maintainer and NVIDIA come up with.

News Source: Phoronix