NVK Driver Nearing Vulkan 1.1 For NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 & Newer

[dragon321]

So: signed firmware is the issue because no GSP? Could QEMU be used somehow to make a virtualized GSP as a middle-layer for clock control?

Yes, in short Maxwell and Pascal needs signed firmware to do reclocking and NVIDIA didn't and most likely won't provide it. Turing and newer can do that with GSP. Kepler doesn't need signed firmware so it can do it as well, although it's pretty experimental and not automatic. So if you want to think about using NVIDIA GPU with open source driver (although it's not there yet) then you want Turing and newer.

Nope. This is hardware thing and you can't workaround that with software. You can't virtualize GSP on GPU that doesn't have GSP. The only way to make it work is to use firmware that NVIDIA needs to provide. I believe that Nouveau developers confirmed that they could in theory extract this firmware from proprietary driver but that would be legally problematic so they doesn't want to do it as they want to keep Nouveau safe from lawsuits. So unless NVIDIA change their minds and provide that firmware, there won't be any hope for Maxwell and Pascal to be usable with Nouveau.

[Eirikr1848]

Reclocking is supported with GSP firmware. GSP is processor inside NVIDIA graphics cards that is supposed to handle things like power management, initialization etc. that was traditionally handled by drivers running on CPU. Nouveau is not handling it by itself, it supports GSP to let it handle it just like NVIDIA open source kernel module does. Problem with most Maxwell and Pascal generation cards is the fact that they simply don't have GSP as it was introduced in Turing generation. Also starting from Maxwell generation (except few first cards that are using this architecture) they require signed firmware to do things like that and NVIDIA didn't provide it. So there is no way for Nouveau to do reclocking on most Maxwell and Pascal GPUs. It can do it for Kepler and some older cards as these didn't require signed firmware.

It's pretty unlikely that NVIDIA will provide this firmware so Maxwell and Pascal situation most likely won't improve and these cards will be unusable with Nouveau.

So: signed firmware is the issue because no GSP? Could QEMU be used somehow to make a virtualized GSP as a middle-layer for clock control?

[dragon321]

What is blocking reclocking support at this point?

Reclocking is supported with GSP firmware. GSP is processor inside NVIDIA graphics cards that is supposed to handle things like power management, initialization etc. that was traditionally handled by drivers running on CPU. Nouveau is not handling it by itself, it supports GSP to let it handle it just like NVIDIA open source kernel module does. Problem with most Maxwell and Pascal generation cards is the fact that they simply don't have GSP as it was introduced in Turing generation. Also starting from Maxwell generation (except few first cards that are using this architecture) they require signed firmware to do things like that and NVIDIA didn't provide it. So there is no way for Nouveau to do reclocking on most Maxwell and Pascal GPUs. It can do it for Kepler and some older cards as these didn't require signed firmware.

It's pretty unlikely that NVIDIA will provide this firmware so Maxwell and Pascal situation most likely won't improve and these cards will be unusable with Nouveau.

[Developer12]

What is blocking reclocking support at this point?

On older cards without a GSP built-in, reclocking is impossible without signed firmware which nvidia refuses to provide.

[Eirikr1848]

Why not? Nouveau performance was blocked by lack of firmware but now thanks to GSP reclocking and other features are not issue anymore and nothing stops it from providing same performance as NVIDIA proprietary driver.



There is experimental support for older GPUs (up to Kepler) in NVK but in Pascal and most Maxwell GPUs it's not really worth it. Without reclocking performance will be bad and it will be unusable for almost anything. Not like Vulkan is great on Pascal even in proprietary driver, NVIDIA started supporting Vulkan properly from Turing.

What is blocking reclocking support at this point?

[You-]

Do you mean when supported cards are not officially supported by Nvidia? Maybe yes then, but newer ones will have issues and proprietary Nvidia driver will be the only one with proper support.

By the end, yes and the proprietary driver will no longer support the card. But there is also the middle, where when youtubers have compared the performance of cards that are still supported but no longer current, their performance was drastically lower than when they were launched (or the competitor card performance drastically increased by then). it seemed Nvidia mostly concentrated on the performance of the latest and greatest and the rest were made to be compatible.

I dont know if that is still the case with 2xxx and 3xxx series

[dragon321]

The Nouveau Gallium driver would need to be refactored to use the new NAK shader compiler rather than the old codegen. Reclocking was one major issue, but the old shader compiler is also a major issue, both for performance and stability (lots of subtle bugs). It just comes down to whether someone does the work or not.

It would be but we also have Zink for that. Nouveau might be the first driver where Zink will be used instead of native OpenGL driver.

Ngreedia: We dont care for your needs of proper open source drivers.

Linux peasants (together with the white knights): Its ok Dear Leader Jensen, we will do it for free as a show of our unconditional love!

AMD: scratches head and decide to give up in providing Linux with proper open source driver support and love since its ignored by the community.

Oh yeah, because the only reason why AMD makes open source drivers is to get some love from community. Nothing more so when they realize that NVIDIA also gets support from community despite not providing proper support, they will give up on open source. /s

Oh yeah, somebody just discovered that open source means sometimes that you do work for free without company support and a lot of good software was made thanks to people that were willing to do "work for free" without any support.

[antonyshen]

Will this work evolve to support older kepler chipset?

[fong38]

Ngreedia: We dont care for your needs of proper open source drivers.

Linux peasants (together with the white knights): Its ok Dear Leader Jensen, we will do it for free as a show of our unconditional love!

AMD: scratches head and decide to give up in providing Linux with proper open source driver support and love since its ignored by the community.

AMD is definitely not being ignored and any Linux desktop hardware survey involving GPUs will show you that. This is merely a matter of making all hardware vendors viable for those who care about a FOSS stack. On the other hand why do you feel obliged to repeat the exact same in any thread mentioning Nvidia rather than simply moving on to topics you care far more about?

[timofonic]

Not at the start but by the end, definitely (as it will be the only supported path).

In the middle... nvidia drivers were notorious for not keeping their relative performance for past generations against comparable AMD cards, so it will be interesting to see.

Do you mean when supported cards are not officially supported by Nvidia? Maybe yes then, but newer ones will have issues and proprietary Nvidia driver will be the only one with proper support.