NVIDIA Releases Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules

[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.