Years of waiting end this week for data center operators running NVIDIA’s compute-focused GA100 chips on Linux systems. The open-source Nouveau driver gains official support for the GPU in the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel. This change arrives courtesy of the final drm-misc-next pull request ahead of the merge window. And it marks a quiet but meaningful step forward for those who prefer to avoid proprietary binaries. The GA100, part of NVIDIA’s Ampere architecture, stands apart as a compute-only accelerator. It lacks the 3D graphics engine found in consumer counterparts. That distinction kept it from full Nouveau integration until now. Phoronix reported in February that NVIDIA engineers posted patches to enable the card through the GPU System Processor, or GSP. Those patches treated the GA100 much like a Turing chip for bring-up purposes. They relied on Turing GSP-RM firmware. But why the delay? Earlier Ampere cards had gained GSP support in Nouveau. The GA100 required specialized handling.…