Nouveau NVKM master control block for NVIDIA GPUs (NV04 through GA100)
A core piece of the open-source Nouveau driver that manages the master control unit on NVIDIA GPUs, which gates interrupts and powers engines on and off. It covers an extremely wide span of NVIDIA hardware, from late-1990s NV04 chips through Ampere-generation data-center parts like the A100, plus Tegra SoC GPUs such as GK20A and GP10B.
recommendation
Worth keeping but worth annotating: this is a small, low-churn piece of the open-source Nouveau driver that handles interrupts and engine power for roughly 25 years of NVIDIA GPUs, from late-1990s NV04 cards through Ampere parts like the A100 that NVIDIA still sells in 2025. It still gets upstream fixes (GA100 work in late 2022, a Turing/GSP-RM series in 2023), and the new Nova driver only targets newer GSP-based GPUs, so no full replacement exists yet for the older silicon and Tegra SoC GPUs this code covers.
repository signals
sources
- patchwork.freedesktop.org
Patch series touching this MC code landed in late 2023 for tu102+/GSP-RM handling, indicating upstream maintenance rather than abandonment.
- patchwork.freedesktop.org
This directory still received non-treewide upstream fixes in late 2022 (ga100 MC change), consistent with active maintenance on supported NVIDIA generations.
- nvidia.com
NVIDIA still marketed the Ampere A100 with current product briefs and certified-system positioning, supporting the inference that at least part of the GA100-backed hardware family remained sold new in 2025.
- cateee.net
LKDDb shows nouveau remains present through 6.19-rc+HEAD and covers NVIDIA display-class PCI devices; this supports ongoing upstream support and continued deployment on legacy/discrete GPUs.
- cateee.net
LKDDb shows nouveau platform support for Tegra SoC GPUs including gk20a/gp10b, matching chips represented in this directory and indicating ongoing non-PCI deployment niches.
- docs.kernel.org
Kernel docs say nova intends to supersede nouveau only for GSP-based GPUs and is still work in progress, so there is no full upstream replacement for this directory's broad NV04-GA100 coverage.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Not an entry-point module but real hardware-driver code: per local shell inspection, this directory implements the NVKM MC block for many NVIDIA GPU generations. lore-http MCP was unavailable and `lei` was absent, so upstream activity was established from local `git log` plus patchwork links embedded in commit messages (shell), which showed substantive MC work in 2022-09/2023 and no obvious removal/deprecation hits. Web search provided the NVIDIA A100 product page, LKDDb pages for nouveau and nouveau_platform, and kernel nova docs. Recommendation is keep-annotate: the directory is legacy-heavy and low-churn, but it still covers deployed hardware including Tegra niches and at least some Ampere-era parts, with no clear full replacement yet.