Open-Source NVIDIA Vulkan "NVK" Driver Continues Progressing

[oleid]

If the kernel driver is upstreamed,

I thought that driver wasn't for upstreaming.

[Barley9432]

I thought that driver wasn't for upstreaming.

Think he's talking about the useless Nouveau kernel driver.

One can hope that upstream would accept NVIDIA's kernel driver as it works really well (well enough for it to be accepted by SUSE), but upstream's requirements go beyond "it works great"

[sarmad]

the kernel driver is already upstream?

No, I'm saying IF.

[sarmad]

I thought that driver wasn't for upstreaming.

My understanding is that it's not yet upstreaming ready, but I thought upstreaming is the end goal. Why wouldn't they want to upstream it?

[karolherbst]

Think he's talking about the useless Nouveau kernel driver.

One can hope that upstream would accept NVIDIA's kernel driver as it works really well (well enough for it to be accepted by SUSE), but upstream's requirements go beyond "it works great"

That's entirely up to Nvidia at this point. And yes, Nvidia as everybody else has to play by upstream rules.

[sarmad]

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?

I'm not sure if GBM and all that stuff is related to Vulkan as well or just OpenGL, but from the perspective of OpenGL none of that should apply since Zink would just be running in user space, so the OS will just see a Zink powered game as any other Vulkan game.

[Barley9432]

My understanding is that it's not yet upstreaming ready, but I thought upstreaming is the end goal. Why wouldn't they want to upstream it?

They would have to rewrite a perfectly working kernel driver almost from scratch. Frankly ridiculous. But they have said their end goal at least back in May was for it to be upstreamed.

[CommunityMember]

My understanding is that it's not yet upstreaming ready, but I thought upstreaming is the end goal. Why wouldn't they want to upstream it?

Correct. Almost everyone agrees that the current (preliminary) driver is not upstreaming ready today, even if it is the goal. It should be noted that having a open source user space client (say, a Mesa Vulkan implementation) is one of the gating factors for the kernel driver (or any new DRM driver) to be accepted upstream. As to when all the stars will align, no one is quite willing to say.

[NeoMorpheus]

So many excuses for this anti-foss company…

i just dont get it.

Well, assuming that you have a real reason to require their lock-in tech cuda, then ok, but the rest….

[dragon321]

So many excuses for this anti-foss company…

i just dont get it.

Well, assuming that you have a real reason to require their lock-in tech cuda, then ok, but the rest….

More choice is always better. I would rather have choice between Intel, AMD and Nvidia GPUs, not only Intel and AMD.