NVIDIA's Open-Source Linux Kernel Driver Performing At Parity To Proprietary Driver

With the recently introduced NVIDIA 555 Linux driver stable series their open-source GPU kernel driver modules are in great shape across consumer and professional graphics products. Over the past two years the support has evolved so much that NVIDIA is now promoting their open-source kernel driver usage and with the NVIDIA 560 Linux driver beta posted this week they are defaulting to using their open-source kernel driver modules in place of the proprietary option -- on the Turing and newer GPUs supported by the open-source code. Here is a fresh look at the impact.

The NVIDIA open-source kernel driver modules shipped by their driver installer and also available via their GitHub repository are in great shape. With the R555 series the support and performance is basically at parity of their open-source kernel modules compared to their proprietary kernel drivers. The proprietary kernel drivers will continue to be available from the NVIDIA installer package for supporting pre-Turing GPUs and those wanting to opt for it with existing generations but moving forward new NVIDIA GPUs are just being enabled along their open-source driver. It's with Blackwell and all future products only being enabled by the open kernel modules.

With the NVIDIA 560 Linux driver series there is continued improvements to the driver such as getting VRR working for notebooks on the open-source kernel modules.

Going the route of the MIT/GPLv2 dual-licensed kernel modules from NVIDIA also now means more features than their proprietary driver. The open-source kernel driver modules allow for confidential computing, Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage, Heterogeneous Memory Management, CPU affinity for GPU fault handlers, DMA-BUF support for CUDA allocations, and other features to come.

As a reminder, the same (closed-source) user-space components for OpenGL / OpenCL / Vulkan / CUDA are used regardless of the NVIDIA kernel driver option with their official driver stack.

NVIDIA recently sent over the Ada RTX A2000 and RTX A4000 workstation graphics cards. Linux reviews on those cards will be coming up soon while I also used these for a fresh look at the proprietary versus open-source kernel module performance.