Nvidia is popular with Linux gamers who use proprietary hardware drivers, but those who have a nearly vegan religious approach to open source are not really catered for, Nvidia's open-source support has lagged behind Intel and AMD on Linux and Nvidia not officially supporting the community-based, mostly-reverse-engineered Nouveau driver.

Nvidia has been working on the Tegra K1 and newer graphics driver support for the open-source driver which is seen as being a sea change.

The outfit has been neutral against Nouveau but have been supplying some recent hardware samples to Nouveau developers, a little bit of public documentation, and Nvidia answering some questions for Nouveau developers. Push hardware reference headers into the Nouveau driver is therefore a big step.

Phoronix said that Nvidia's system software team has begun aligning their new-chip development efforts with Nouveau.

Nvidia's Ken Adams said that the outfit would like to arrive at a place where the Nouveau kernel driver code base as its primary development environment.

To drive Nouveau as Nvidia s primary development environment for Tegra, it is looking at adding "official" hardware reference headers to Nouveau.

"The headers are derived from the information we use internally. I have arranged the definitions such that the similarities and differences between GPUs is made explicit. I am happy to explain the rationale for any design choices and since I wrote the generator I am able to tweak them in almost any way the community prefers."

So far he has been cleared to provide the programming headers for the GK20A and GM20B. For those concerned that this is just an item for pushing  future Tegra sales Ken said: in "the long-term I'm confident any information we need to fill-in functionality greater than or equal to  NV50/G80 will be made public eventually. We just need to go through the internal steps necessary to make that happen." It's just like Intel and AMD with legal/IP review being time consuming."