Ben Skeggs, the maintainer of the the open source Nouveau driver for Linux, has resigned from Red Hat and is “stepping back from nouveau development.”

Nvidia has historically not played nice with Linux, refusing to open source its drivers until recently. As a result, developers took it upon themselves to reverse engineer Nvidia’s drivers, resulting in the open source Nouveau driver.

Skeggs has maintained the Nouveau driver for years, but announced his decision to step back in an email to the project mailing list:

Hi all,

As you may have gathered from the MAINTAINERS patch I just sent out, I have resigned from my position at Red Hat, and will be stepping back from nouveau development.

This is a personal decision that I’ve been mulling over for a number of years now, and I feel that with GSP-RM greatly simplifying support of future HW, and the community being built around NVK, that things are in good hands and this is the right time for me to take some time away to explore other avenues.

I still have a personal system with an RTX 4070, which I’ve been using the nouveau GSP-RM code on for the past couple of weeks, so chances are I’ll be poking my nose in every so often 🙂

I wish everyone the best, and look forward to seeing the progress you all make on nouveau in the future.

Happy hacking!

Ben.