Open-Source NVIDIA Outlook Brighter Due To GSP Firmware, But Major Challenges Remain

[fitzie]

If Nvidia started to go open, I'm pretty sure they will get there faster than Nouveau could, even if they had the missing bits for re-clocking now. Nouveau still has its place, but it would be cool if Nvidia's driver was open enough so that Nouveau developers could just close up shop and move over. One can only dream.

nvidia only opensourced their driver because they were starting to lose sales. they have nothing like the amdgpu effort which was amd's goal to create a native linux driver, which was a significant effort, and was well after they decided to go opensource. There was some considerable motivation at the time because amd was the only game in town. while nvidia is more popular for enterprises for gpgpu, that market is moving to dedicated training hardware. If nvidia is going to make its move to have an upstreamed gpu driver, they better get started soon. It would be amazing not to think of nvidia hardware as avoid-if-possible, but these days for desktop, having an discrete gpu is starting to become a liability, not a plus.

[Quackdoc]

this is very exciting, some cheat rtx 2060s are around, and I have been very tempted to pick one up. intel dgpu playing with it for a bit has been neat, but the growing pains are strong (still cannot get vaapi to work) on the A380 after messing with it for a few days. it certainly shows potential though, it's sitting in my second gpu slot while me and a friend try to get vaapi working on it. but it will be nice to have good foss support from nvidia. even if unofficial

[piotrj3]

Well, if we could include the source code of the firmware within the kernel source code we wouldn't need a stable blob ABI.

Even if nvidia wanted and laws patents not applied it is still not possible. It is not written in C, Also 30MB is firmware in binary blob. Source code would be so large it would overwhelm the entire kernel.

[mdedetrich]

nvidia only opensourced their driver because they were starting to lose sales. they have nothing like the amdgpu effort which was amd's goal to create a native linux driver, which was a significant effort, and was well after they decided to go opensource. There was some considerable motivation at the time because amd was the only game in town. while nvidia is more popular for enterprises for gpgpu, that market is moving to dedicated training hardware. If nvidia is going to make its move to have an upstreamed gpu driver, they better get started soon. It would be amazing not to think of nvidia hardware as avoid-if-possible, but these days for desktop, having an discrete gpu is starting to become a liability, not a plus.

The naivety/cluelessness of some people is outstanding. I can almost guarantee you that NVidia's decision to opensource a tiny part of their graphics stack (even calling it open sourcing is a stretch, they basically put some logic into closed firmware on the onboard graphics chip, i.e. GSP and the open source part is an interface + glue code to that firmware) had nothing to do with recent sales, due to the fact that such decision are preplanned years before.

NVidia did this because Linux is moving to Wayland and since their EGLStream effort didn't get community buy-in, they were forced to do this in order to properly support GBM/KMS etc etc for Wayland. There were other reasons as well, i.e. their current distribution method doesn't work well with some distros.

[hamishmb]

I guess the new driver module is conceptually similar to how the videocore drivers work on Raspberry Pis. Still, it's a big improvement over no functional FOSS driver at all for recent cards.

[bug77]

The naivety/cluelessness of some people is outstanding. I can almost guarantee you that NVidia's decision to opensource a tiny part of their graphics stack (even calling it open sourcing is a stretch, they basically put some logic into closed firmware on the onboard graphics chip, i.e. GSP and the open source part is an interface + glue code to that firmware) had nothing to do with recent sales, due to the fact that such decision are preplanned years before.

NVidia did this because Linux is moving to Wayland and since their EGLStream effort didn't get community buy-in, they were forced to do this in order to properly support GBM/KMS etc etc for Wayland. There were other reasons as well, i.e. their current distribution method doesn't work well with some distros.

Pff, countering rants with arguments... When was the last time that worked on the internet?

[andre30correia]

nvidia only opensourced their driver because they were starting to lose sales. they have nothing like the amdgpu effort which was amd's goal to create a native linux driver, which was a significant effort, and was well after they decided to go opensource. There was some considerable motivation at the time because amd was the only game in town. while nvidia is more popular for enterprises for gpgpu, that market is moving to dedicated training hardware. If nvidia is going to make its move to have an upstreamed gpu driver, they better get started soon. It would be amazing not to think of nvidia hardware as avoid-if-possible, but these days for desktop, having an discrete gpu is starting to become a liability, not a plus.

linux desktop is 2% of their sales i doubt is because of that and even with the efforts of intel or amd the reality is, nvidia have the best cards and drivers for gaming and for devs.

[hamishmb]

Linux on desktop might be only a small fraction of their sales, but on the server side it's likely to be a very different picture, considering that most servers run Linux now.

[mdedetrich]

Linux on desktop might be only a small fraction of their sales, but on the server side it's likely to be a very different picture, considering that most servers run Linux now.

Yeah except that servers largely don't care about these changes at all since this is specific to Linux desktop. Servers only care about CUDA and related technologies.

[Quackdoc]

the only thing I could see "forcing" nvidia is fleet PCs, but even then iirc all the linux ones probably use gnome anyway which iirc worked good enough