Red Hat's Long, Rust'ed Road Ahead For Nova As Nouveau Driver Successor

[smitty3268]

Because if you are on latest hardware you will have an option with close sourced, nvk, noveau = 3 drivers. What to install by default for user? If he is gamer? If he will use cuda or video editing software?

There are already open and closed drivers, and it's going to be the same in the future. The only difference is you'll get the new open source driver for new hardware, and the old one for old hardware. And some distros will keep shipping the closed source one, just like they do now.

[mos87]

This is a Linux driver, written by people that are interested in improving Linux, in a language that is relevant for Linux. Why on Earth should some other OS compatibility it be their problem?

lol you still go on man. the tenacity.

[Alexmitter]

Now this is nice for x86_64 and Aarch64 users, a clean new driver will surely work better than nouveau because thats just the nature of things.
While that is bad news for anyone wanting to run a Nvidia GPU on anything else, like RISCV. Like I do have a Nvidia GPU in my HIFIVE Unmatched because that was what I had laying around, of course it isn't GSP supported but if it was I was out of luck now.

They should have really forced the Rust people to step in and create a proper compiler based on GCC before this was allowed in the kernel. Now its a total mess.

[oleid]

Now this is nice for x86_64 and Aarch64 users, a clean new driver will surely work better than nouveau because thats just the nature of things.
While that is bad news for anyone wanting to run a Nvidia GPU on anything else, like RISCV. Like I do have a Nvidia GPU in my HIFIVE Unmatched because that was what I had laying around, of course it isn't GSP supported but if it was I was out of luck now.

They should have really forced the Rust people to step in and create a proper compiler based on GCC before this was allowed in the kernel. Now its a total mess.

Why? Rustc does work fine on riscv.

[RedEyed]

I don't get it.

Nvidia officially supports Linux and provides blobs, maybe not the best support as we wanted. I can run CUDA, do deep learning at least.

Why one is writing its own reverse enginired open source Nvidia driver without CUDA support? Which problem will be solved?

[cend]

I don't get it.

Nvidia officially supports Linux and provides blobs, maybe not the best support as we wanted. I can run CUDA, do deep learning at least.

Why one is writing its own reverse enginired open source Nvidia driver without CUDA support? Which problem will be solved?

The Linux kernel's internal interface used by drivers is unfortunately unstable by design. Mainline drivers are stable because someone breaking an internal interface is required to fix every user of it in the mainline kernel, but they are not responsible for out-of-tree drivers like NVIDIA's proprietary graphics drivers. See <https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/stable-api-nonsense.html>.

If you want the newest features of Linux (instead of just using LTS kernels), troubleshooting out-of-tree drivers is going to be a painful process, and nouveau is the only reasonable choice.

[mxan]

I wonder how this can be leveraged by other OSes than Linux that don't have anything but VESA for Nvidia graphics. OpenBSD and NetBSD don't have much for Nvidia graphics though Net does have an old version of Nouveau but lacks support for newer Nvidia GPUs. Illumos kernel OSes I am not for sure on, once upon a time the Unix driver worked on Solaris but I am unsure how Illumos and Solaris have drifted apart if the Unix driver that works on Solaris and FreeBSD works on those OSes. Being written in Rust will be a problem point for those C kernel that have no Rust support in kernel. Wish they would have gone with well written C for OS compatibility.

BSD and Illumos are irrelevant on the desktop, and Red Hat only sells Linux, so why would they waste their time writing a driver for other OSes?

Nvidia's proprietary driver is ultimately the same binary on Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris; it should work on Illumos still. Illumos's port of DRM is hilariously out of date because, just like BSD, no one is using it on the desktop, and compared to BSD on servers, Illumos has even fewer users. I think Illumos made a big mistake trying to chase Linux by splitting the kernel and userland, they should've had it done the BSD way where there's only "one true Illumos".

[Quackdoc]

Didnt see this one comming, but glad it is, more rust is always nice.

[yoshi314]

there is a whole class of exploits tageting gpu drivers, so i would say it's the perfect place for some memory safety.

well, assuming you can perfectly manage memory on that level. just because something is written in rust doesn't magically make it memory-safe in 100% of cases.

[Volta]

I don't get it.

Nvidia officially supports Linux and provides blobs, maybe not the best support as we wanted. I can run CUDA, do deep learning at least.

Why one is writing its own reverse enginired open source Nvidia driver without CUDA support? Which problem will be solved?

Not everyone wants to run closed proprietary crap. Of course they would be smarter if they bought GPUs from better companies.