linux-drivers/
drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau/nvkm/engine/bsp

Nouveau BSP video decode engine for NVIDIA Tesla GPUs

A small piece of the open-source Nouveau driver that drives the BSP (bitstream processor) video decode block found on NVIDIA's Tesla-generation GPUs from around 2007-2008, including the G84, G86, G92, G94, G96, and GT200 chips used in GeForce 8000, 9000, and 200 series cards. It corresponds to NVIDIA's first PureVideo HD VP2 hardware, introduced for Blu-ray and HD-DVD playback offload.

deprecate conf=0.81 last_sold=2010 deploy=low replacement=none subsystem=gpu category=graphics-display
81%

recommendation

A candidate for future removal because the GPUs it serves stopped being sold roughly fifteen years ago, the code has seen no meaningful work since a 2021 cleanup, and the surrounding Nouveau activity has moved on to newer architectures. There is no active patch series proposing deletion yet, so it is reasonable to flag it for deprecation rather than rush a removal, but its real-world relevance to anyone running a current kernel is minimal.

repository signals

2 files
44 source lines
0 commits, 5y
+0 / −0 lines added / removed, 5y
0 authors, 5y

sources

  1. git.kernel.org

    Kernel tree path is a tiny Nouveau BSP engine implementation with only g84.c in this directory.

  2. git.kernel.org

    The BSP engine is wired only into older NVIDIA Tesla-era chipsets such as G84, G86, G92, G94, G96, and GT200.

  3. git.kernel.org

    Path history is effectively dormant; latest visible change is a 2021 constructor conversion, with earlier activity mostly 2015-2019 refactors and one 2017 disable-default change.

  4. en.wikipedia.org

    G84/G86/G92/G94/GT200 correspond to PureVideo HD VP2 / VDPAU Feature Set A, introduced in 2007-2008 for Blu-ray/HD-DVD era decode offload.

  5. en.wikipedia.org

    These chips belong to NVIDIA's Tesla generation, long superseded by later GPU architectures.

codex reasoning notes (technical)

Local shell inspection showed this is real kernel driver code, not docs/tests/helpers: one BSP engine object under Nouveau, referenced from device/base.c for Tesla-era GPUs. Local git log (via shell with git -c safe.directory=...) showed no substantive maintenance after 2021 and no sign of active removal discussion. Kernel.org URLs are canonical recall chosen to correspond to the inspected local files/log. Wikipedia URLs were obtained via web search_query and used to identify the hardware generation as 2007-2008 PureVideo VP2/Tesla parts. Given dead upstream activity, no new-hardware sales by 2025, and only residual legacy use, deprecate is stronger than keep-annotate, but remove is not justified without active upstream removal work.