Red Hat & NVIDIA To Collaborate On Some Open-Source Efforts

Red Hat announced this morning they are collaborating with NVIDIA around open-source innovations for emerging workloads such as artificial intelligence and deep learning.

The initial Red Hat and NVIDIA partnership is certifying Red Hat Enterprise Linux for NVIDIA DGX-1 hardware as well as other Red Hat software products like Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

Beyond the RHEL certification for DGX systems, they are also working on NVIDIA GPU Cloud (NGC) containers for Red Hat Open Shift. Additionally, they confirm their collaboration around Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) for the Linux kernel.

NVIDIA and Red Hat developers have already been collaborating for years on the initial HMM code even prior to it being merged into the mainline kernel. It is Red Hat's Jerome Glisse who has been leading the HMM initiative and NVIDIA has been interested in it for their proprietary GPU Linux driver while there is experimental open-source Nouveau code as well for HMM. It will be interesting to see what the RedHat+NVIDIA HMM cooperation leads to in the future.

What today's press release doesn't comment on is about Red Hat's effort over the past year on getting SPIR-V compute support working for the open-source NVIDIA driver... Red Hat has multiple developers working on SPIR-V for the Nouveau driver to bring up OpenCL compute support and eventually a possible Vulkan driver. There have also been other improvements to this driver since Red Hat hired Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst at the end of last year to join their graphics driver team.

It remains a mystery why Red Hat is devoting measurable resources to this effort when the compute performance would be crippled in the current Nouveau driver form due to the Maxwell2 hardware and newer currently lacking re-clocking support, meaning that the GPU clocks are stuck to their (low) frequencies at boot time rather than their optimal rated clock frequencies. Since the GTX 900 series the Nouveau options are quite locked down due to the NVIDIA GPUs now requiring signed firmware images.

Anyhow, it will be interesting to see where these Red Hat and NVIDIA collaborations lead moving forward.