nouveau (software)
![In the middle: the FOSS stack, composed out of DRM & KMS driver, libDRM and Mesa 3D. Right side: Proprietary drivers: Kernel BLOB and User-space components.](/Images/godic/202502/07/The_Linux_Graphics_Stack_and_glamor.svg0615.png")
![Nouveau has been rewritten as a Gallium3D-style graphics device driver.](/Images/godic/202502/07/Gallium3D_example_matrix.svg0616.png")
![A screenshot of REnouveau in action (REnouveau is the blue window in the top left corner)](/Images/godic/202502/07/Renouveau-screenshot-on-debian-with-kde0616.png")
![Data and instructions are sent to the GPU for processing. The rendered results are not sent back to main memory. Instead they are stored in a framebuffer. The content of the framebuffer is subsequently sent to the display controller.](/Images/godic/202502/07/Linux_kernel_and_OpenGL_video_games.svg0616.png")
nouveau (/nuːˈvoʊ/) is a free and open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards and the Tegra family of SoCs written by independent software engineers, with minor help from Nvidia employees.
The project's goal is to create an open source driver by reverse engineering Nvidia's proprietary Linux drivers. It is managed by the X.Org Foundation, hosted by freedesktop.org, and is distributed as part of Mesa 3D. The project was initially based on the 2D-only free and open-source "nv" driver, which Red Hat developer Matthew Garrett and others claim had been obfuscated. nouveau is licensed under the MIT License.