NVIDIA Publishes 73k Lines Worth Of 3D Header Files For Fermi Through Ampere GPUs

[betam4x]

Wow I was not aware that NVIDIA was transitioning to open source. Big, if true.

[sabian2008]

but Linux has 100% top500 supercomputer marketshare (and HPC makes heavy use of GPUs)

also, for that "2%" minority group: AAA windows games running on Linux great with AMD open source drivers, more problems using closed-source NVIDIA stack (or even closed-source AMD stack for that matter)

This is almost relevant, except Nvidia's GPGPUs have had open drivers (with a closed userspace) for years now.

[karolherbst]

I've seen a few people are complaining that moving a lot of stuff to firmware will do anything to put a large wrench in the dev efforts for people working on nouveau, to some even claiming it will break some degrees of mesa driver support. any idea of how this may or may not actually effect mesa's nouveau developemnt? for example can we expect some vulkanor gl features not to work? will it be difficult to work with or is it a non issue?

don't see why that would impact anything. We'll use the same firmware Nvidias driver will be using. The only bad thing is, that the firmware is a binary blob and you can't really know what it's doing. But in regards to features it shouldn't prevent anything.

[tildearrow]

Go back to your BSD cave, please 😘

You mean Windows city

[oiaohm]

I've seen a few people are complaining that moving a lot of stuff to firmware will do anything to put a large wrench in the dev efforts for people working on nouveau, to some even claiming it will break some degrees of mesa driver support. any idea of how this may or may not actually effect mesa's nouveau developemnt? for example can we expect some vulkanor gl features not to work? will it be difficult to work with or is it a non issue?

The reality is the large wrench as already been put in with the signed firmware problem and cryptocoin mining blocking. How Nvidia was able to limit crypto coin usage of there GPUs is by the firmware.

So mesa not exactly behaving how the firmware expects could result in clock speeds being limited that the reality of the Nvidia cards these days. Yes it even possible that you get a new game under Windows that the nvidia firmware miss id as something to speed cripple you will be screwed as well.

Of course not having signed firmware to change clocks out of safe mode clock is far more damaging. Lot of parties have no reason to fund nouveau development because without the means to reclock the hardware there is no valid means be competitive. Yes using firmware extracted from Nvidia drivers outside license is also outside this.

Thing to remember crippling stuff by firmware as odds of back firing on Nvidia closed source drivers as well. Nvidia has already had a case of that some programs under performed because they were tripping the anti cryptocoin mining when they were doing nothing like mining.

[birdie]

It's apparently legal hush-hush, but I've heard rumors of being able to extract the firmware from NVIDIA's proprietary firmware, and then use it for clocking with nouveau. I'm not sure on specifics.

It's perfectly possible but it's illegal, so nouveau developers cannot follow this path.

[arQon]

I have a couple theories:
1. The more obvious one - a few months ago they were hacked, and one of the [last-minute] conditions to not have their data released was for them to start open-sourcing drivers. Seems Nvidia took the threat seriously even before the open-source condition, so maybe they really are following through with it.
2. Nvidia may finally be realizing that doing closed-source drivers does absolutely nothing to help them. (snip)

Well, (1) is obviously ridiculous, so we can just ignore that outright. (2) doesn't fit with nvidia's corporate culture, or the internal and external messaging of the last 20-ish years, and is mostly untrue anyway, so that's absurdly unlikely too.

So I'm going to go with "3: something you didn't think of". My best guess would - strangely - be "exactly what it looks like", which is that this is the first step towards any kind of progress on this front, which coincidentally happens to be, you know, what they already announced they'd be doing a few months ago.

I mean, it's possible that it's "3: give a dog a bone", since this does nothing of any meaningful benefit *unless* it's just the first step in a more complete and complex process - but since nvidia DGAF about the feewings of a handful of entitled asshats, and doing even this much would be a waste of time and energy unless they planned to follow up on it, nobody sane would buy that idea either. Unless they're just trolling, of course - but again, Occam's Razor.

[birdie]

An interesting discussion on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32396638

[mdedetrich]

I have a couple theories:
1. The more obvious one - a few months ago they were hacked, and one of the [last-minute] conditions to not have their data released was for them to start open-sourcing drivers. Seems Nvidia took the threat seriously even before the open-source condition, so maybe they really are following through with it.
2. Nvidia may finally be realizing that doing closed-source drivers does absolutely nothing to help them. Any special exclusive API or feature they've made has had some open-source alternative, which obviously didn't need to spy on their code to work, but was also undermining their efforts (and thereby making the R&D costs not as profitable). Nvidia likely sees how AMD is creeping into more and more markets despite having an overall inferior platform, where one of the only real differences is being very open. AMD's openness sometimes makes them the only sensible choice (at least until Arc becomes good enough). For example, you can compile their drivers for obscure platforms or do PCI passthrough with VMs more easily. AMD also pretty much profits off their openness since 3rd party developers are improving their drivers for them. What company wouldn't want free labor?

I am sorry but you are projecting here because this completely wrong on both counts. With 1 NVidia (or any company like them) would not cave into "open source hacktivists" because it would create a bad precedent and for 2, NVidia didn't really open source anything of value. The only thing they have open sourced is the in kernel wrapper and the only way they made this possible is by putting their proprietary logic into an onboard chip that exists on NVidia GPU's (thats why NVidia's new open source wrapper only works with newer GPU's, older GPU's physically don't have this GSP chip).

In fact the main reason that NVidia open sourced this kernel wrapper was basically to play better with GBM and also Wayland.

[carewolf]

Why reclocking is possible on AMD and Intel GPus by open drivers?

Because they are not trying to cripple open source drivers.