Instances of the Falcon microcontroller appear in modern Nvidia GPUs and
are crucial to the GPU boot process. Document some concepts which will
make nova-core boot code easier to digest. All the information is
derived from public sources such as public documents, OpenRM and Nouveau
code.
Signed-off-by: Joel Fernandes <joelagnelf@nvidia.com>
Reviewed-by: Bagas Sanjaya <bagasdotme@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Alexandre Courbot <acourbot@nvidia.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20250708-nova-docs-v4-8-9d188772c4c7@nvidia.com
Signed-off-by: Danilo Krummrich <dakr@kernel.org>
Add explanation of fwsec with diagrams. This helps clarify how the
nova-core falcon boot works.
Signed-off-by: Joel Fernandes <joelagnelf@nvidia.com>
Signed-off-by: Alexandre Courbot <acourbot@nvidia.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20250708-nova-docs-v4-7-9d188772c4c7@nvidia.com
Signed-off-by: Danilo Krummrich <dakr@kernel.org>
devinit is mentioned in the code. This patch explains it so it is clear
what it does. devinit is not only essential at boot-time, but also at
runtime due to suspend-resume and things like re-clocking.
Signed-off-by: Joel Fernandes <joelagnelf@nvidia.com>
Reviewed-by: Bagas Sanjaya <bagasdotme@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Alexandre Courbot <acourbot@nvidia.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20250708-nova-docs-v4-6-9d188772c4c7@nvidia.com
Signed-off-by: Danilo Krummrich <dakr@kernel.org>
Add detailed explanation and block diagrams of the layout of the vBIOS
on Nvidia GPUs. This is important to understand how nova-core boots an
Nvidia GPU.
[ Applied Timur Tabi's feedback on providing link to BIT documentation. ]
Signed-off-by: Joel Fernandes <joelagnelf@nvidia.com>
Signed-off-by: Alexandre Courbot <acourbot@nvidia.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20250708-nova-docs-v4-5-9d188772c4c7@nvidia.com
Signed-off-by: Danilo Krummrich <dakr@kernel.org>
Add the initial documentation of the Nova project.
The initial project documentation consists out of a brief introduction
of the project, as well as project guidelines both general and nova-core
specific and a task list for nova-core specifically.
The task list is divided into tasks for general Rust infrastructure
required by the project, tasks regarding GSP enablement and firmware
abstraction, general GPU driver tasks as well as tasks related to
external API design and test infrastructure.
Reviewed-by: Alexandre Courbot <acourbot@nvidia.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20250306222336.23482-6-dakr@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Danilo Krummrich <dakr@kernel.org>
