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

[Goddard]

Interesting.....this is a great development if they are really moving in this direction.

[Danny3]

Well. Holy shit. It's happening.

Wait wait wait wait. This is too much to take in.

Are you sure this doesn't have anything to do with the data leak?

We already have an ongoing pandemic and a war, besides the large scale cracking and leaks, so the hell is probably freezing over...
It's the year when everything is happening!
Who knows, it might be the year of Linux too!

[PluMGMK]

No way... is hell finally freezing?

My thoughts exactly… https://youtu.be/srvrI-dRjRw?t=29

Welp, good news I guess!

[lowlands]

It seems Red Hat was involved in making this happen: https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2022/05/11/why-is-the-open-source-driver-release-from-nvidia-so-important-for-linux/ Thanks Red Hat!

[oleid]

You never could compile the nvidia kernel modules from source. You could compile shims around a binary blob. This replaces that with pure open source.]

Fair enough. But still, you cannot count on this driver working with new kernels. For bleeding edge end-users nothing will change (except driver features) until the code gets integrated.

[splitcells.net]

2022: What a year! https://giphy.com/gifs/mashable-l3q2K5jinAlChoCLS

[ezst036]

Wow!

Huge thanks to those at Nvidia who worked to get this accomplished.

Two thoughts: (1) What is the structure of this going to be like in comparison to the AMDGPU PRO driver's plugin kind of architecture? I'm just asking, and seeking to collect more information.

(2) In what ways will this accelerate resolving the issues we are seeing with Wayland / GBM / Mesa with respect to explicit vs implicit rendering?

I hope a more inclusive approach toward code and development more speedily brings Forum to a conclusion.

[bug77]

Very nice. My guess is that eventually Nouvue (I hate this unspellable name BTW) will depend on this open kernel modules and start competing against the closed user space libs in terms of features and performance, and eventually what happened on AMD's side is likely to happen with nVidia as well.

That "unspellable" name is just the French word for "new"

[dragonn]

For bleeding edge end-users nothing will change (except driver features) until the code gets integrated.

It will change even at this point:
- the kernel devs will stop trying to deliberately break the nvidia driver because the use symbols they are not allowed to do
- even if something in the internal kernel API will change you can expect patches from third party devs much sooner to fix nvidia driver on newer kernel.

[You-]

Rememeber guys, this is still useless without:

1. Redistributeable firmware
2. Display driver
3. userspace.

From those 3 the community has only ever required nvidia to do 1 and the community can do 2 and 3. They still haven't, though they likely will and its a timing issue for now. But until then I will wait with the party.