NVIDIA engineer John Hubbard and Red Hat's Danilo Krummrich presented at this week's LPC2026 conference in Prague on the open-source and upstream Nova driver stack that continues forming as a Rust-based open-source NVIDIA Linux kernel driver.

The Nova driver shouldn't be new to any long-time Phoronix reader but it continues advancing and slowly NVIDIA is communicating more about it. As you can imagine with NVIDIA dedicating many engineers to working on the open-source Nova driver, they have grand plans for this upstream driver once it's full-featured and ready for end-users. And, yes, a replacement to the existing upstream Nouveau driver for Turing GPUs and newer.

The Nova driver was presented at LPC2026 as long-term being "a replacement for Open RM." The NVIDIA Open RM "Resource Manager" is the open-source but out-of-tree NVIDIA kernel modules that NVIDIA has been using the past few years. Eventually the plan is for the NVIDIA Linux driver stack to use the upstream Nova kernel driver code as a replacement to their out-of-tree open-source kernel module code.

Slowly NVIDIA is talking more about this and their long-term plans for Nova. When I was at NVIDIA HQ earlier this year there were more comments in that direction when prodding them on Nova albeit still haven't received any official comments for publication to elaborate further or any committed timeline. Nova though isn't a drop-in / API compatible replacement for the existing out-of-tree driver interfaces but will require adapting by the NVIDIA user-space driver components.

The current status of Nova was reported as getting the GPU System Processor (GSP) booted with its firmware on Turing through Blackwell hardware with basic functionality coming online. But it isn't yet ready in a state for end users.

Some of the upcoming work on Nova is to include Linux and Windows guests in VMs working with Nova, various other virtualization features, getting Vulkan Compute and CUDA apps running on Nova, and more graphics/display functionality.

Nova continues to be entirely written in the Rust programming language and in the process also bringing up more Linux DRM functionality with Rust infrastructure.

Those wishing to learn more can find the Nova LPC 2026 presentation assets at lpc.events.