Nouveau: Accelerated Open Source driver for nVidia cards
The nouveau project aims to build high-quality, free/libre software drivers for nVidia cards. “Nouveau” [nuvo] is the French word for “new”. Nouveau is composed of a Linux kernel KMS driver (nouveau), Gallium3D drivers in Mesa, and the Xorg DDX (xf86-video-nouveau). The kernel components have also been ported to NetBSD.
Current Status
2D/3D acceleration supported on all GPUs; see FeatureMatrix for details.
Video decoding acceleration supported on most pre-Maxwell cards; see VideoAcceleration for details.
Experimental support for manual performance level selection (also known as "reclocking") on GM10x Maxwell, Kepler and Tesla G94-GT218 GPUs. Starting Linux 4.5, available in /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/pstate, previously boot with nouveau.pstate=1 and use /sys/class/drm/card0/device/pstate.
Little hope of reclocking becoming available for GM20x and newer GPUs as firmware now needs to be signed by NVIDIA to have the necessary access.
News
Apr, 2017: Fix for GTX 970 with 4GB VRAM and 2D/3D acceleration support for Pascal headed for Linux 4.12.
Dec, 2016: Improved reclocking support for GKxxx and GM10x merged into Linux 4.10-rc1
Oct, 2016: GP10x modesetting support merged into Linux 4.8
