Nvidia Open-Sourced their Linux GPU Kernel Driver!

It finally happened! Nvidia released the source code for their Linux kernel driver. What exactly does that mean, though?

#Nvidia #OpenSource #Linux

Mentioned in this video:

[Toxicity]

The radeon GPU Driver was initially not made by AMD, it was an reserve engineered effort by independent engineers similar to the nouveau driver. But AMD first opened up the specifications of their GPUs which helped to get the driver to an much better state and then later added some patches themselves to improve it.

[DublinV]

Im willing to bet Nvidia did this because a combination of things you mentioned. Additionally the steam deck is making large ripples and when SteamOS is released they can see the writing on the walls. Additionally China is replacing all windows OS with OSS alternatives. Feels like they waited for the absolute last minute inflection point to comply

[Minikahn]

I never would have expected this!! Holy moly!

[jemag]

Never thought this day would happen. A step in the right direction indeed

[ellafoxoo]

If you do a little digging, you'll find that no, they didn't open source the driver. They've just moved 99% of the source code into a 34MB firmware blob. Apple's GPU firmware blob by comparison is in the order of 400kB. This is just a PR stunt by NVIDIA whilst also giving the finger to kernel developers.

[mritunjaymusale]

My guess is SteamOS 3 broke down nvidia.
(My speculation) Valve wants the whole SteamOS as distro to be completely open source so that they make their hardware last longer and other OEMs can just use the iso from Valve's website in their handhelds. Now this compounded with the stuff you mentioned in the video and the fact that Valve's Wayland compositor works well with open source drivers but won't even show up in most cases on Nvidia must have forced Jensen to finally give up and release the driver.

[Nabalazs]

I saw this video on my sub feed and just screamed WHAT.

[adamkelly]

Man, I couldn't believe it either!! From what I understand, however, NVIDIA can still keep most of the "secret sauce" in a firmware blob that is run in privileged mode on the GPU. So, at this point, there is no downside to them open-sourcing these "outer" portions of the driver. It's truly a win-win situation. They get a driver maintained by more people and can focus their software engineers on the cutting edge stuff. I hope this will also help AMD, and give us more leverage for cross platform efforts for graphics and ML APIs (eg. Vulkan, CUDA)

[MatthewSmithx]

This 100% has to do with secure boot and the fact that governments and other organizations that 1. Run Linux 2. Are under strict security requirements 3. Buy billions worth of hardware. To date these orgs have begrudgingly made exceptions for certain use cases but compliance is king and secure boot is a requirement. Red Hat says to NVIDIA, dudes, we sell a compliant OS and your software taints it and puts it out of compliance. What gives? NVIDIA says, so what? Red Hat says look at who is buying your cards and putting our OS in the systems and how much money we both make from that. NVIDIA says, oh I get it now.

[csolisr]

The mandatory blobs still requires signed firmware to work, so for the sake of freedom nothing has really changed

[alerey]

Well, Rossmann started Right 2 Repair, you may have started Right 2 Recompile 🤓

[hedgeearthridge]

I really hope this leads to a better and actually fully usable experience for Linux with Nvidia. As ive heard it before, we basically have no idea how the proprietary driver works, so we just have to improvise it to work with Linux, hence all the horrific screen-tearing issues, bugs, compatibility problems, etc. Still, my next GPU is going to be AMD, i'm done fighting with Nvidia's bullcrap. The Nvidia's Wayland incompatibility alone is enough to make that choice easy

[Yuriel]

I don't know your work on the pi with graphics cards may have had more sway than you think. I know I saw you specifically mentioned in an article not too long ago. Congratulations BTW. And yes I think Nvidia is finally seeing the writing on the wall. Probably that not being transparent enough can get you into trouble. Lol

[Randrew]

It was a far different landscape back in the "Super" VGA days when chip and board makers would send you a board and 2 kgs of printed technical manual to enable driver development.

But I'll have to admit there wasn't really much of a performance advantage. It was more a matter of being able to actually use VGA modes beyond IBM's original spec on specific hardware. No close standardization at the hardware level, so a "Tseng Labs" driver was more of a fixup for usability than for performance.

[hannahkiekens]

Somehow this all feels like they finally talked to a lawyer and did the absolute minimum to comply to GPL
Maybe some big contract supercomputer needed the GPLed source code for their kernel

[pum]

A 2 minute video made in a day of this announcement, you know it's a good announcement when this happens

[PsRohrbaugh]

My dad works at Nvidia and he said it was totally your raspberry pi video that made them do it.

[alexlandherr]

Seems promising for us with old systems using Nvidia cards that want to switch to Linux.

EDIT: By old I mean ~3-4 years. My laptop won’t be supported since it uses a GTX 1050 4GB but my desktop uses a RTX 2080 8GB.

[plica]

Now nothing remains but to get Broadcom to open-source their wifi drivers.

[rpavlik]

If the kernel code supports reclocking, this is really great. Even if they don't release the 3D drivers, I'm sure Nouveau or something like it in Mesa will be able to fill the gap fairly quickly using Gallium. Very exciting!