NVIDIA's New Allocator Library Will Need A Lot Of Work In 2018

Last week NVIDIA sent out an experimental allocator driver for the Nouveau code-base as well as EXT_external_objects support for Nouveau NVC0 in Mesa. So far though many upstream open-source driver developers are not yet convinced about the current design of this Unix Device Memory Allocation library as a potential replacement to GBM.

Those interested in the technical interrogation now happening, see this mailing list thread where NVIDIA's Miguel Angel Vico has now summed up many of the questions and answers. One of the recurring statements is on NVIDIA supporting DRM format modifiers but a lot of other potential design issues as well.

It will certainly be interesting to see where this leads in 2018. NVIDIA is certainly interested in this approach over trying to support the Generic Buffer Manager and something must be done so they can properly support Wayland. Stay tuned to Phoronix to see how this situation plays out.