page_title: Nouveau (software)
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Nouveau (software) / History
context_page_description: nouveau is a free and open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards and the Tegra family of SoCs written by independent software engineers, with minor help from Nvidia employees.
  The project's goal is to create an open source driver by reverse engineering Nvidia's proprietary Linux drivers. It is managed by the X.Org Foundation, hosted by freedesktop.org, and is distributed as part of Mesa 3D. The project was initially based on the 2D-only free and open-source "nv" driver, which Red Hat developer Matthew Garrett and others claim had been obfuscated. nouveau is licensed under the MIT License.
  The name of the project comes from the French word nouveau, meaning new. It was suggested by the original author's IRC client's French autoreplace feature, which suggested the word "nouveau" when he typed "nv".
context_section_description: nouveau was started in 2005 by Stéphane Marchesin as a series of patches upon the "nv" driver, and officially announced in February 2006 at a FOSDEM event. The first live demo of nouveau was at Linux.conf.au 2007. In 2010 nouveau was accepted in the 2.6.33 version of Linux kernel as an experimental driver. On 26 March 2012, the nouveau driver was marked as stable and promoted from the staging area of Linux 3.4. nouveau gained a major internal architecture overhaul in Linux 3.7.
  nouveau originally used the Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) of Mesa 3D for rendering 3D computer graphics, which allows to accelerate 3D drawing using the graphics processing unit (GPU) directly from the 3D application; but in February 2008 the work on DRI support ceased and moved on to the new Gallium3D.
  On 23 September 2013 Nvidia publicly announced, that they would release some documentation about their GPUs with the intent to address areas that impact the out-of-the-box usability of NVIDIA GPUs with nouveau.
  As of 31 January 2014, Nvidia's Alexandre Courbot committed an extensive patch set which add initial support for the GK20A (Tegra K1) to nouveau.
  As of 9 July 2016, Red Hat employee Ben Skeggs committed a patch which adds support for the Pascal-based GP104 chip found on GeForce GTX 1070 and GeForce GTX 1080-branded graphics cards to the Linux kernel.
  Status of 2016 and Future work were introduced in XDC2016. Status of new efforts in OpenCL are shown on FOSDEM.
caption: Left: classic-style graphics device driver; Right: Gallium3D-style graphics device driver. Both types share a lot of free and open-source code.