NVIDIA Hopper & Blackwell GPU Support Moves Closer For Open-Source Nova Driver - Phoronix

Recent progress has been made toward supporting NVIDIA's Hopper and Blackwell GPUs through the open-source Nova driver. While the existing upstream Nouveau driver already supports these GPUs via the G... Read original →

NVIDIA’s push for the Rust-based Nova driver isn’t just open-source goodwill—it’s a strategic recapture of GPU software control. Technically, Nova decouples the Foundation Security Processor (FSP) from kernel-space logic, reducing reliance on proprietary GSP firmware and enabling robust Hopper/Blackwell support in Linux-based AI/HPC deployments. This pressures CUDA toward greater openness. From a compliance angle, it mitigates antitrust scrutiny in the EU and U.S., while easing export control risks for foundries in Taiwan, China and South Korea by sidestepping certain EAR restrictions via open drivers. AMD and Intel will accelerate ROCm and oneAPI optimizations, especially for MI300 and Ponte Vecchio. Within 18 months, if Nova merges into mainline Linux, cloud providers will reassess GPU virtualization stacks—and Rust’s memory safety may become the de facto standard for next-gen hardware abstraction layers.