Nouveau (software)

nouveau () 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. The name of the project comes from the French word nouveau, meaning 'new'. It was suggested by the original author, Stéphane Marchesin, after his IRC client's French-language autocorrect system offered the word "nouveau" as a correction for the letters "nv".