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

[You-]

- the kernel devs will stop trying to deliberately break the nvidia driver because the use symbols they are not allowed to do

Is there any basis to this? Reads like a conspiracy theory nvidia buyers would make to support the "its not nvidia, its everyone else!" status of play

[ryao]

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.

It is possible for the community to write patches to support newer kernels. It was possible to some extent with the nvidia binary driver previously, but without being able to see inside the blob, it might not have always been clear that the change was correct. I saw the gentoo maintainer for the nvidia driver reject a patch I tried to give him years ago because he could not review the driver source code.

[ryao]

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.

Redhat reportedly plans to make open source replacements for the user space bits:

https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2022/05/11/why-is-the-open-source-driver-release-from-nvidia-so-important-for-linux/

[Jahimself]

I like very much the illustration pictures. Especially the first one. We have an expression in France that people shout when they are very happy and wants to celebrate something that was not expected or is a big relief, it's simply "champagne!" I don't know if it's champagne, but it's looking nice in the middle of all these nice GPUs

[fwyzard]

The use of the open source kernel driver is

dependent upon the GPU System Processor (GSP). [...] The GSP is binary-only firmware loaded at run-time.
The open-source kernel driver explicitly depends upon the GSP-supported graphics processors.

So... we move from an open source "shim" around a binary blob running on the main CPU, to and open source "driver" requiring a binary blob running on a separate CPU.

Is it really such a big improvement ?

[evasb]

Is this really a big deal? I don't see how this barebones release is a something more than a kernelspace glue for their userspace blob.

[oleid]

The use of the open source kernel driver is

So... we move from an open source "shim" around a binary blob running on the main CPU, to and open source "driver" requiring a binary blob running on a separate CPU.

Is it really such a big improvement ?

Not a big one, however as mentioned before it could improve debugging capabilities. And, this is my hope, could create an oss momentum for the rest as well.

[karolherbst]

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.

it literally contains 1. and 2.

[Melcar]

This is probably just the start and they plan to further open other bits in the near future. AMD took a while to "fully" open source their drivers if I'm not mistaken (and I write "fully" because even today some bits are still closed off).

[ssokolow]

Is this really a big deal? I don't see how this barebones release is a something more than a kernelspace glue for their userspace blob.

Look at the Open Pandora handheld.

They chose the OMAP3 SoC because, with the closed-source parts of the GPU driver being entirely in userland, they can keep upgrading the kernel without updates from the vendor to keep the GPU driver in sync.

nVidia's GPL condom was only good until they decided to refactor a relevant piece of the kernel's internals for more efficiency and the binary-only portion of the kernel module no longer lined up with things.