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

[rogerx]

Hilarious! Amazing how many are readily suckered into some hardware vendor stating "Linux support" or other Linux related support statements without even researching first.

All of the partial articles posted via RSS incited all older nVidia GPUs being supported by the open sourced driver. Reading into this article and/or updated/re-edited article,

"Only Turing and newer GPUs will be supported by this open-source kernel driver."

Well, let's all search what a Turing GPU is, they are only the most recent nVidia RTX GPUs! These GPU's require firmware uploads, and firmware uploads require significant time delays during Linux booting for uploading! I also readily guessed even while reading all of the press hype last night, the open source would likely only support the most recent GPUs.

Without wasting much more time researching what nVidia did open source, I'm readily guessing this so-called "open sourced nVidia driver" is just a simple open code wrapper around the proprietary firmware driver, and as to how much code nVidia actually open sourced is likely going to be subjective. (eg. Those believing hype, will likely believe in any open code submitted.) Having used nVidia hardware for 15-20+ years, I know better than to bite on this one. And, I'm going to guess, you're still going to be blessed with your random mysterious X/Xorg 100% CPU spins requiring rebooting/shutdown!

Regardless as to whether or not nVidia did publish an open source driver for all of it's hardware, my next discreet GPU will be an Intel GPU. I've already transitioned with my recent Dell Xe laptop.

[dimko]

Again with the fake news.

Nvidia makes it quite clear that this is all about corporations and data centers. The Phoronix article also makes this clear. "already production-ready for data center GPU usage."

Gamers are second fiddle for Nvidia. It's the corporate big wigs buying $50,000 A100 accelerators that Nvidia cares about. That's why they got an immediate production-ready code. If I gave you $50,000 dollars, you'd care about me too. That's not to say that gamers are un-important. But it's clear that money is talking much louder here than anybody in this discussion board.

So companies work for money and take care of biggest money maker customers first. What else is new? Or why is corporation is at fault here?

The fact that they move in right direction is great. Incremental improvements - is what drives OSS world, as long as improvements are happening and are often enough, before they become irrelevant. Which time will show.

[brenohrocha]

Holy s***, Finally! It's clear that is totally driven by profit from Data Centers/Corporations but I'm not complaining. Many like me didn't have a choice to buy a laptop with AMD hardware few years ago. Everyone benefits from this!

[Monsterovich]

"Humiliation"? "Forgive" what exactly? Infinite demands and insults?

I have a long list of what's wrong with the NVidia drivers. Linux is a third class citizen for NVidia. At least compare the GPU configuration software on Windows and Linux. On my old NVidia GPU I had problems with getting out of suspend mode. This process took about a minute (!) because of the driver. Even on my current RTX 3060ti there are minor artifacts caused by suspend. I don't have any of these issues on open-source drivers.

I've been using NVIDIA GPUs along with their blob with few to no issues for almost two decades now - more than most people here have used Linux and longer than some of people here have lived.

Generally speaking, everything works well - it's true. But some applications have problems - what works well on non-NVidia GPU, doesn't work on NVidia. Especially I notice this in DE compositors. Developers can't look into the source code, and NVidia hasn't fixed many problems for years.

Just don't tell me about Wayland, OK? I don't care about this wonderful shiny ... crap.

Nah, I'm not a Wayland fanboy. Wayland is monolithic crap that pushes the GNOME dictatorship.

[peterdk]

Great to see some progress. Even though driven by data center market. Hopefully it also helps nouveau.

[tuxd3v]

I'm excited to read all this! Already when I read about Tegra I was like... huh.. but this!!
Still, kinda bummed that it's Turing+, damn...

Indeed, at least they should find a solution till Pascal..

[Sevard]

I have no mess with NVIDIA drivers both under Linux and Windows. It all just works. There's no need to lie and make things up.

Try to install official NV drivers on Linux with fully encrypted filesystem. Most likely it won't boot. I encounterd this bug 6 years ago and most likely it's not fixed to this day (last time I tried to check this last year). IIRC for some reason NV drivers tries to access some file on encrypted filesystem in this case. Eg.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...h/+bug/1721988
And yes - it can be fixed with some crazy workarounds, but every kernel upgrade breaks this. And all the other GPU drivers don't have this issue.

Another issue - secure boot. When you have dual boot with Windows with Bitlocker enabled it's something crazy.

[abu_shawarib]

"Only Turing and newer GPUs will be supported by this open-source kernel driver."

Well, let's all search what a Turing GPU is, they are only the most recent nVidia RTX GPUs!

Turing is 2000 series not 3000.

Without wasting much more time researching what nVidia did open source, I'm readily guessing ...

Then don't spew some random speculations...

[birdie]

Try to install official NV drivers on Linux with fully encrypted filesystem. Most likely it won't boot. I encounterd this bug 6 years ago and most likely it's not fixed to this day (last time I tried to check this last year). IIRC for some reason NV drivers tries to access some file on encrypted filesystem in this case. Eg.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...h/+bug/1721988
And yes - it can be fixed with some crazy workarounds, but every kernel upgrade breaks this. And all the other GPU drivers don't have this issue.

Another issue - secure boot. When you have dual boot with Windows with Bitlocker enabled it's something crazy.

• No idea, fully encrypted system here, zero issues. This is relevant for 0.1% of users out there but WFM.
• Secure boot here with my own certificate, again zero issues.

[birdie]

I have a long list of what's wrong with the NVidia drivers. Linux is a third class citizen for NVidia. At least compare the GPU configuration software on Windows and Linux. On my old NVidia GPU I had problems with getting out of suspend mode. This process took about a minute (!) because of the driver. Even on my current RTX 3060ti there are minor artifacts caused by suspend. I don't have any of these issues on open-source drivers.

Windows is a gaming platform/OS, Linux (distros) pretends it's a gaming platform. Compare AMD and Intel Windows drivers to Linux drivers - no graphics settings panels at all unlike NVIDIA which at least offers something. The open source Linux kernel driver does not address or solve this issue as it hasn't for AMD and Intel.

I have had zero issues with suspend for the past five years, earlier indeed there were issues. Since I hate the "works for me" argument Linux users love so much to use, I frequent NVIDIA Linux forums and I haven't seen a lot of commotion in regard to suspend [issues] either. Actually not a single topic related to suspend for the past few months.

Speaking of artefacts - where's your bug report on NVIDIA forums? Screenshots? I've seen nothing. Are you using the latest drivers? Are they properly packaged? I saw minor artefacts but last time it happened probably around 2017. And then when you restart an affected application, everything looks great, and artefacts disappear.

Generally speaking, everything works well - it's true. But some applications have problems - what works well on non-NVidia GPU, doesn't work on NVidia. Especially I notice this in DE compositors. Developers can't look into the source code, and NVidia hasn't fixed many problems for years.

I have had no issues with KDE and XFCE X11 compositors in the past couple of years. Again, nothing on NVIDIA Linux forums either.

Nah, I'm not a Wayland fanboy. Wayland is monolithic crap that pushes the GNOME dictatorship.

That's nice to hear. Actually Wayland is a nice idea, it's just the implementation which is severely lacking.