Nvidia Transitioning To Official, Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Driver

erek

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"To much excitement and a sign of the times, the embargo has just expired on this super-exciting milestone that many of us have been hoping to see for many years. Over the past two decades NVIDIA has offered great Linux driver support with their proprietary driver stack, but with the success of AMD's open-source driver effort going on for more than a decade, many have been calling for NVIDIA to open up their drivers. Their user-space software is remaining closed-source but as of today they have formally opened up their Linux GPU kernel modules and will be maintaining it moving forward. [...] This isn't limited to just Tegra or so but spans not only their desktop graphics but is already production-ready for data center GPU usage."

https://linux.slashdot.org/story/22...-official-open-source-linux-gpu-kernel-driver
 
Linux wasn’t worth supporting in 2012, wasn’t until maybe 2015 when the applications for Linux got to a place where the money was there to make it worth while.
Now there’s too many custom kernels floating around too many large datacenter’s all wanting something slightly different for it to be affordable to remain closed source.

But credit where credits due, AMD’s open drivers and hardware stack are finally at a place that they can think about challenging Nvidia in the Datacenter. Their open drivers can allow for rapid tweaks that tailor performance for specific tasks on custom kernels far faster than Nvidia can currently match. To not risk those contracts Nvidia has to go open source or they have to both hire engineers and decrease their pricing, that last one doesn’t look great on a balance sheet.
This may also have something to do with Intel as well so they should get an honourable mention here, supposedly their datacenter cards are doing great and are rock solid, but they are also open, in the sense that if you buy them you can have access to the code. Doubt we’re gonna see that on GitHub any time soon though.
 
AMD Graphics Driver Surpassing 4 Million Lines Of Code In Linux 5.19, NVIDIA Opens Up At 1 Million

also benchmarks of the new OSS nvidia driver due out today:

1652361448363.png
 
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https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia-r515-open&num=1

The Initial Performance Of NVIDIA's R515 Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Driver

Not bad out of the gate for an alpha driver with a few things like power management still not really there.

Nvidia may not have a great reputation in Linux circles... but if they can keep their open source driver up to snuff long term, it will go a long way to repairing that.
 
Necro-ing this due to the Linux discussion in the news. Has there been any progress on this? Is Nvidia actively supporting this still? Or did the just dump it to the community to maintain/advance?
 
uraeus said:
https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2023/11/29/fedora-workstation-39-and-beyond/

So the challenge with Nouveau is that for the longest while it offered next to no hardware acceleration for 3D graphics. The reason for this was that the firmware that NVIDIA provided for Nouveau to use didn’t expose that functionality and since recent generations of NVIDIA cards only works with firmware signed by NVIDIA this left us stuck. So Nouveau was a good tool for doing an initial install of a system, but if you where doing any kind of serious 3D acceleration, including playing games, then you would need to install the NVIDIA binary driver. So in the last year that landscape around that has changed drastically, with the release of the new out-of-tree open source driver from NVIDIA. Alongside that driver a new firmware has also been made available , one that do provide full support for hardware acceleration.

That's from 4 months ago, fwiw. The kernel module didn't expose much, but it did allow packaging the nvidia driver more easily for linux, better integration into dkms for instance. Now it looks like they are opening up some firmware, dunno if it's for their mainline GPUs or ARM/etc, haven't read that much into it yet.
 
Necro-ing this due to the Linux discussion in the news. Has there been any progress on this? Is Nvidia actively supporting this still? Or did the just dump it to the community to maintain/advance?
Nvidia is gradually, Nvidia’s issue is that much of their enhancements, optimizations, and functions that give them their edge or unique functionality is spelled out in their drivers. This was rumoured to be true, but when their system was hacked and the snippets of their various drivers were released it was basically confirmed.
To facilitate moving over to a completely open source model that proprietary sauce of theirs needs to be moved over from a driver level to a firmware level, as AMD does. So that those features and secrets are still contained with a locked down blob and simply accessed via API.
To do that Nvidia needs to completely re write their drivers top down and change up their GPUs to contain much more storage for Firmware and other onboard Micro code.
They also need to change up their internal update policies, Nvidia rolls out software updates almost weekly, weekly firmware updates is potentially far more problematic.

So TLDR;
Nvidia is working on it, but they have to completely re do how they do things to facilitate it and it is a slow process.
 
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To do that Nvidia needs to completely re write their drivers top down and change up their GPUs to contain much more storage for Firmware and other onboard Micro code.
They also need to change up their internal update policies, Nvidia rolls out software updates almost weekly, weekly firmware updates is potentially far more problematic.
And that is a heavy lift for sure - years of accumulated code like a rubber band ball of fixes on top of fixes, tweaks and optimizations that have to be pulled apart, re-examined and refactored.

But they seem to understand they would only benefit from an open-source driver model, along with erasing any driver-induced performance disparities between windows and Linux- to the extent it will be critical to their continuing success. Considering they're on track to eventually becoming the first 10 Trillion dollar company thanks to AI, while refactoring may not be as simple as copy-pasting source code into ChatGPT and telling it "convert to opensource", they've got more resources than god including their own internal AI stack to help make it happen.
 
Why did Linus Torvalds flip off Nvidia?


Linus Torvalds, the software engineer who became the chief architect of the Linux kernel, has hit out against graphics giant Nvidia for its lack of support for the Linux platform.Jun 18, 2012

Linus Torvalds F-bombs Nvidia over lack of Linux support | ZDNet

About two years later, Linus Torvalds was giving Nvidia the thumbs up. This is a point many Linux neck beards conveniently forget:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/torvalds-gives-nvidia-software-thumbs-up-not-middle-finger/

"This time I'm raising a thumb for Nvidia. Good times," Torvalds said Sunday night on Google+"

As for NVK, it's been a thing for quite some time now, it's still nowhere near any form of feature parity with Nvidia's proprietary drivers.
 
Necro-ing this due to the Linux discussion in the news. Has there been any progress on this? Is Nvidia actively supporting this still? Or did the just dump it to the community to maintain/advance?
Honestly no, but Nouveau has made good progress. You're not going to use Nouveau over Nvidia's drivers anytime soon. They finally started working on NVK, a Vulkan driver. I have some really old Nvidia GPU's like DX9/DX10 level GPU's and I have no choice but to use Nouveau, but it works.

Was just announced that Nova is the successor to Nouveau, by RedHat.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Red-Hat-Nova-Rust-Abstractions
 
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