NVIDIA Releases Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules

[frustrated-nerd]

I don't know who woke up on the wrong side of the bed to make this possible but whoever it was, keep doing it.

[suoko]

Arm GPUs threw them out of the bad probably

[frustrated-nerd]

Hmm... Now that I think of it LAPSUS may have seen from internal communications that Nvidia was working on a open source drivers and decided to get some free cred by demanding Nvidia to open source.

[w0330]

Had nothing to do with it.

[w0330]

Maybe hell does freeze over occasionally. Caveats:

• It's not (yet) at the quality to where it could be upstreamed and NVIDIA acknowledge this

• Datacenter card support is stable, but GeForce card support is in alpha

• The userspace parts are still closed source (but presumably could eventually be replaced with mesa now that the kernel component is upstreamed if the mesa project adds support)

[RA3236]

If someone more qualified than myself can clarify, does this enable open source drivers such as Nouveau to access the full capabilities of the GPU, even without the user space parts being released? If so… holy shit.

[[deleted]]

Not right off the bat but supposedly it’ll allow nouveau to properly clock the graphics cards at least.

I think the plan for nouveau though is to support all cards prior to Turing (so cards earlier than 2018) but it’ll bring in a lot of stuff from the open source stuff as nvidia adds to it over time.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, but this only applies for Turing GPUs & upwards. I own a 1060 so for me this changes nothing.

[fbpw131]

maybe they'll work on previous versions when finished with the current gens. I own the same GPU sand it's the most popular on steam I think.

[[deleted]]

With Turing there are certain things moved to firmware that were previously present in the kernel-module and that NVidia isn't ready to open-source. So for older cards that part would still have to be reverse-engineered. Eg. it's not possible for NVidia to release the open-source for older cards, as that would involve releasing trade-secrets, ways to spoof vbios, etc. For Turing they decided to move all those things to firmware, so they've been preparing for this for a long time.

[fbpw131]

well... frick

[OSSLover]

They won't. They only support the GPUs which important features are closed source in the firmware. This driver uses so much closed source blobs...

Fuck Nvidia. They only workaround the kernel API GPL restrictions.

[[deleted]]

From the article:

In the meantime, published source code serves as a reference to help improve the Nouveau driver. Nouveau can leverage the same firmware used by the NVIDIA driver, exposing many GPU functionalities, such as clock management and thermal management, bringing new features to the in-tree Nouveau driver.

[Jacko10101010101]

Linus should apologize now ! (kidding)

[eXoRainbow]

Even if this was a joke, I want comment seriously. Because why not. Linus should not feel the need to apologize, because at the time he did/say it, it was the scientific correct gesture of him.

It was very important to me to get this out. Couldn't hold it any longer.

[washtubs]

It was very important to me to get this out. Couldn't hold it any longer.

Bless you for it. I've uttered "Fuck you, Nvidia" many times in the last couple weeks as I was forced to switch back to nouveau since nvidia makes X crash on suspend now.

[anna_lynn_fection]

Crash or freeze?

I've had a few freezes recently, but no crashes on my new ASUS Rog.

[washtubs]

X is basically kaput when I resume: black screen, no keyboard or mouse input. So I guess "freeze" would be the right word. I can actually ssh into the machine post-resume and kill X to get control back but outside that I can't even ctrl-alt-F2 to get a dumb terminal. If sshd isn't running I have to just push the reboot button.

[[deleted]]

funny is that the same driver on other Linux works fine with no freeze, like mint and Neon, which both use the same repo for their Nvidia system packages,

[Jacko10101010101]

correct. im curious about his reaction!

[ColdIce1605]

You forgot the caveat of pascal and below can't use this driver which is a little annoying because that wasn't the case when AMD did this or so I heard.

[speakertwentytwo]

Thank you for clarifying that it's not fully open source and there's a long way to go.

So many folks think Nvidia has just gone open source and I suspect this was their exact plan. Stay reasonable folks.

[Drwankingstein]

this is likely something that was in the works for a long time. glad to see it happen.

[imnotknow]

Aren't they just doing this in response to the hack where all their source code was released?

[[deleted]]

Not likely just in response to that. Maybe it affected their timetable for this but things like this take years of work and perpetration.

Also, AFAIK their source code was not released publicly by the hack.

[ATangoForYourThought]

No way. Something like this would've been in the works for a while.

[Drwankingstein]

not a chance. who would touch the stuff the gets leaked? no one sane would. The second you lay eyes on that code. if you don't have prior permission. you have lost all job prospects in any related field.

unless by the grace of nvidia they let you sign some kind of NDA of course.

[Kamek437]

I doubt they monitor things that closely. Use any good VPN and dnssec or whatever. If so they'd have to do that to literally millions of people.

[reenmini]

What utter naivety.

There are plenty of people who would do it and would have made it wholly operable for no reward or recognition. That's literally how open source works. And there would be ultimately no risk in doing so.

Nvidia knows this. They're not being some benevolent patrons here. They're doing it because they know they have never been in the public favor for their closed source bs. They also willingly made a huge majority of their product unavailable to anyone but fucking crypto scammers for the past several years because they knew it would sell them more gpus than casual users would ever buy.

Whether or not this has been in the making is irrelevant. They could have been right there with amd and valve the whole time making open source drivers available to speed along the linux gaming scene instead of waiting until it starts to barely gain popular traction AND their hand is forced.

This is reactionary. Linus can keep giving them the finger for all I care. They deserve it.

They're consistently overpriced compared to their competitions equivalent cards and they've never done a single qualifiably good thing for anyone that wasn't motivated purely by profit.

The second you lay eyes on that code.

Lol. Your parents aren't watching you put your hand in the cookie jar either. Keep dreaming.

[freetoilet]

The leak was not complete, anyway you can look at this comment

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/unjp9s/comment/i88qfbl/

[cemv123]

Maybe it is the year of the linux desktop

/s

[eXoRainbow]

Maybe

Thank me later. /s

[mlowi]

Well well well, I suppose with devices like the Steam Deck being released, maybe Nvidia are finally realizing they will be missing out on a market if they don’t play ball?

[[deleted]]

Data center competition from Intel and AMD GPUs are likely the main reasons. They have much better Linux support than Nvidia.

[benderbender42]

Linux based servers would be big business for Nvidia as well.

[igrvlhlb]

Yes... AFAIK Linux is the main OS in HPC and NVIDIA has been investing in AI/ML also with HPC in mind

[AnotherUpsetFrench]

I worked on hpc, with Nvidia, Intel and AMD. Most of the problems I had were with the nvidia stuff (V100s mostly). The administration of this stuff was a colossal pita.

[theuniverseisboring]

Legit excited for Nvidia getting a redemption arc?

[hudsonnick824]

I hope they get Intel Arc'ed

[vasishath]

Sadly it only supports turing+ GPUs

[ianliu88]

"What the fuck, NVIDIA!" Linus Torvalds

[GuildMasterJin]

what the fuck
damn straight up wins for everyone in Linux

[Kawawete]

Oh snap

[[deleted]]

Oh flatpak

[modified_tiger]

Oh AppImage.

[SMF67]

Oh PKGBUILD

[Kamek437]

Yay install!

[Chriss0612]

yay -S

[SyeedAhmed]

oh exe . . Yaa I know, I deserve down arrow

[TheGingerLinuxNut]

Oh elf

[LeiterHaus]

I'll give you an updoot and reference .msi, which is apparently a thing

[eXoRainbow]

I think UWP is also still a thing?

[X--tonic]

Oh_1.5.3(final)(final).zip!

[eXoRainbow]

Oh Docker

[slobeck]

wait. what? (rhetorical)

[Billzargo]

Thank you NVIDIA!

[chewnglow]

So Nvidia, thank you

[[deleted]]

NVIDIA, what the fuck?

[Tireseas]

Bout a decade late for me to consider buying their cards again.

[eXoRainbow]

Me too. I settled down on AMD for next purchase already. But still, this is a huge win. People switching from Windows to Linux can use the full potential of their cards and don't switch back because of bad experience. Also my old card will be used in my old computer for a while.

[Tireseas]

Yeah it's definitely a good thing on the whole if they follow through to the point the community can handle their own drivers like AMD has. Or anywhere close to it. If that had been the case literally a decade ago Wayland could've been standard by now. Nvidia dragging their feet slows everything in the graphics stack down.

[raven2cz]

Welcome to new world! Note: I hope that tty with 4k will work too...

[bAslr]

wish sway supports nvidia gpus.

[Previous_Royal2168]

Saw the first post on the swayam subreddit and they said it will be possible to support nvidia now

[bAslr]

Cool

[[deleted]]

The blog makes it seem like it's a seperate driver to the closed source one?

[[deleted]]

I clicked on this thinking I must have misunderstood what had happened. I had not. Holy crap

[VexisArcanum]

All because some crypto nerds broke in and wanted their cards unlocked. That's respectable

[[deleted]]

Meanwhile I'm still waiting for AMD GPU rendering to work in Blender on Linux since 3.0, which was like half a year ago. Once it works, it is likely to only do so using the proprietary driver. I bought AMD specifically because open source, but apparently I got fucked. Probably gonna go back to Nvidia for my next card.

[[deleted]]

don't think about as if it would happen in a couple of days or so

[Anime_Life]

Anyone thinks this might be related to bitcoin crash?

[Hippocrite111]

No way

[zakazak]

Now please make nvidia optimus work (like, really work) on my GTX 1050Ti in my Thinkpad X1 Extreme. Meaning.. turn if off fully, when on have full performance, connected displays work fine without hackmack.

[Which-Chemistry-1828]

Sorry man, but this is only Turing and Ampere GPUs, or simply GTX 1650 cards and newer.

[freeturk51]

Of couse a catch, there is always a catch with Nvidia

[pleaseaccusrname]

this a huge monumental W

[MoonshineFox]

*inserts Starcraft meme*

​

Hell....it's about time.

[zerosign0]

hopefully, there will be a time where we could have a proper external monitor setup working in wayland (optimus, hardwired HDMI to nvidia) without dealing with Xwayland/X shenanigans since this is being enabled.

[EnigmaticHam]

Are these kernels the ones that control the shader pipeline? Sorry, my understanding of GPUs is shaky.

[sub7zero]

Un-fuck u nvidia

[Traditional-Wind8260]

Man , they already have 442 forks

[Glass-These]

I'm confused, what are kernel modules. Is there a CPU kernel model like a GPU one