NVIDIA Promotes Their Open-Source GPU Kernel Driver Support

It's been a wild two years since NVIDIA began publishing an open-source Linux GPU kernel driver for Turing GPUs and newer. With the latest NVIDIA 555 Linux driver series that open-source kernel driver support is in great shape and NVIDIA today is out with a lengthy blog post promoting it.

Appearing today on the NVIDIA Developer Technical Blog is a post entitled "NVIDIA Transitions Fully Towards Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules" where they have laid out the case for their open-source GPU kernel modules that have matured over the past two years. Since the original unveiling they've added in additional features like HMM and around confidential computing and more. With NVIDIA Blackwell and Grace Hopper, only their open-source GPU kernel modules are supported and their former proprietary kernel driver code now unsupported.

For longtime Phoronix readers with our news and Linux driver coverage, NVIDIA's post should not come as much of a surprise but does provide a nice recap for those not keeping up or wanting to know about switching over to the open-source kernel drivers with modern Linux distributions. This driver code remains outside of the mainline kernel but in any event it's a win having this open-source GPU kernel driver support and even though their user-space driver components remain closed-source. I recently wrapped up some new NVIDIA kernel driver benchmarks and will have out an article with those numbers soon.