NVIDIA Looks To Have Some Sort Of Open-Source Driver Announcement For 2020
We were tipped off by a Phoronix reader to this GTC session for GTC 2020 by NVIDIA engineer John Hubbard. It's about "Open Source, Linux Kernel, and NVIDIA." The talk abstract is: "We'll report up-to-the-minute developments on NVIDIA's status and activities, and possibly (depending on last-minute developments) a few future plans and directions, regarding our contributions to Linux kernel; supporting Nouveau (the open source kernel driver for NVIDIA GPUs, that is in the Linux kernel), including signed firmware behavior, documentation, and patches; and NVIDIA kernel drivers."
Color us surprised and damn excited, as long as their announcement is substantive.
It was just back in August that NVIDIA began their open-source GPU documentation site.
The future plans would presumably be about contributing more actual code to the Nouveau driver project for their desktop GPUs and ideally clearing up the signed firmware mess that I've written about dozens (or perhaps hundreds by now) with the PMU firmware blocking their re-clocking support and long story short why for right now only the GeForce GTX 600/700 "Kepler" series is decent with this open-source code. I wouldn't expect NVIDIA to abandon their proprietary driver stack on Linux considering how mature (and feature-complete and performant) that existing closed-source driver solution is and the company likely being unwilling and uninterested in open-sourcing portions including CUDA and the like. So at this point I would wager any bets on a NVIDIA open-source 2020 announcement being to improve their firmware interactions and making direct code contributions to Nouveau.
GTC 2020 runs from 23 to 26 March in San Jose. Given this track, I'll try to be there live. Stay tuned!
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