Open-Source NVIDIA Vulkan "NVK" Driver Continues Progressing

[mangeek]

I've said it before, but NVIDIA should at least offer some sort of option to initialize their older cards with their proprietary driver and then hand-off to Mesa drivers, maybe with a big warning in the control panel that the mode is unsupported.

It's a real drag to be locked out of running the drivers you want on your own hardware, or to see people willing to write open source drivers get sidelined by a market leader, all for no valid reason.

[NSLW]

What benefit do Colabora and RedHat have to work on a driver for hardware they don't produce?

[slalomsk8er]

What benefit do Colabora and RedHat have to work on a driver for hardware they don't produce?

Experienced engineers and a want to use the finished product?

[mangeek]

What benefit do Colabora and RedHat have to work on a driver for hardware they don't produce?

It's not about frames per second in video games, I'll tell you that. When you're trying to sell multi-million dollar service contracts to huge customers, being able to include the top names in hardware become very important. I work adjacent to some rather large computation and visualization systems that run RHEL, and Nvidia is what the data people usually want to run their stuff on. Stuff like vSphere GRID licenses are big money makers.

[microcode]

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.

Is there any downside to it? Lack of control?

[karolherbst]

What benefit do Colabora and RedHat have to work on a driver for hardware they don't produce?

Because it's fun?

[NSLW]

It's not about frames per second in video games, I'll tell you that. When you're trying to sell multi-million dollar service contracts to huge customers, being able to include the top names in hardware become very important. I work adjacent to some rather large computation and visualization systems that run RHEL, and Nvidia is what the data people usually want to run their stuff on. Stuff like vSphere GRID licenses are big money makers.

Thanks but I don't quiet understand. NVidia already redistributes a driver that RedHat can use, so why they spend (big) money to reinvent it?

[toughy]

Finally having a full open-source NVIDIA driver, after a decade of NVIDIA fighting them, would be nothing short of amazing !

Am I right to assume that Steam, now having excellent support for gaming on Linux, might have given NVIDIA the motivational nudge to go open-source ? Or is their motivation still all about Linux use in the data-center somehow ? I would assume enterprise customers for data centers would welcome propriatery drivers where they can get a support contract from NVIDIA...

Seeing how the previously-released 3D classes headers from NVIDIA cover GPU generations back to Fermi, is there some chance NVIDIA will release better kernel support, I mean re-clocking, for these older generations as well ? Maybe after the current generation kernel driver is upstreamed, and they get a chance to see it's not as bad as they thought ?

I don't really have NVIDIA hardware from those generations, except a very low-end 710 / 710M, and those provide a level of experience that I don't whish on anyone. But they are Fermi + Kepler (I have a mobile plus a desktop variant of the card), and to this day I would love to have a full open-source driver for them. Maybe because I spent many years playing an infamous MMORPG with such a low GPU ...

[MauganRa]

Thanks but I don't quiet understand. NVidia already redistributes a driver that RedHat can use, so why they spend (big) money to reinvent it?

That driver is, well, proprietary. In an ecosystem of only proprietary software, this would be fine. However, with FOSS, RedHat and others are used to be able to influence the development of things by just sending in engineers into projects. Non-FOSS things are sticking out like sore thumbs, both technically and legally. And bugfixes and features get implemented at the pace NVidia wants (sometimes not at all), not by what RedHat and others want.