Open-Source NVIDIA Vulkan "NVK" Driver Continues Progressing

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Open-Source NVIDIA Vulkan "NVK" Driver Continues Progressing

As written about for several months on Phoronix, an open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver has been in the works that by the end of the summer this "NVK" driver has been seeing a lot of activity by Jason Ekstrand of Collabora along with David Airlie and Karol Herbst of Red Hat. Jason today talked at XDC 2022 about this NVK driver effort...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVK-Driver-Progress-XDC-2022

[amdevereux]

Biggest question, as always, is reclocking support

[karolherbst]

Biggest question, as always, is reclocking support

done by the new GSP firmware

[sarmad]

If the kernel driver is upstreamed, and NVK gets in shape, we can then just use NVK + Zink and will no longer need the proprietary driver at all.

[mcsy]

Would combining this with Zink (also a product of Collabora) mean fully accelerated, open source Nvidia drivers with reclocking support? I'm curious about bits like GBM and EGLStreams and whatnot, how related/unrelated is this work to the whole NoVideo on desktop experience?

[dragon321]

done by the new GSP firmware

Great to know that!

[microcode]

What's this new situation with firmware? Can third party drivers exercise the full function of the newer NVIDIA GPUs with distributable firmware now?

[blacknova]

If the kernel driver is upstreamed, and NVK gets in shape, we can then just use NVK + Zink and will no longer need the proprietary driver at all.

If your only requirements are UI and games than yes. Proprietary driver is much more though.

[karolherbst]

If the kernel driver is upstreamed, and NVK gets in shape, we can then just use NVK + Zink and will no longer need the proprietary driver at all.

the kernel driver is already upstream?

[karolherbst]

What's this new situation with firmware? Can third party drivers exercise the full function of the newer NVIDIA GPUs with distributable firmware now?

they can and there is already some WIP code for nouveau to use it. It's just a lot of work to use it, because it's one of those "all or nothing" situations, and GSP handles a lot of things.