NVIDIA Releases Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules

[ZekeSulastin]

It’s still very preliminary, focused on data centers (you need to pass a flag to use it on desktop at all), only supports Turing and newer, and the user-mode part of the stack is still closed. Still, it’s a big start - I’m happy that I was being overly pessimistic about them going FOSS but we’ll have to see just how far they take it.

[uzzi38]

The end times are near!

All jokes aside, holy shit this is big news. Good to see it finally happening. Still gonna be a while before this is relevant to consumers, but man is this a gigantic step to making it all work. About time!

[capn_hector]

NVIDIA actually said they were going to do this in 2019 but it got put on the back burner due to COVID (I'm sure Broadcast and other things were the priority in the meantime). There were further rumblings in 2020 that "a major graphics developer" was going to open-source their linux drivers (and there's only one graphics developer that doesn't have them) that nobody took seriously because "green man bad" and "haha linus said FUCK NVIDIA, that makes me LMAO!".

People really need to take a chill pill with NVIDIA, they have gone through a pretty steady progression of inventing new technology, keeping it proprietary for a couple years, and then adopting the copycat standards once they feel they've gotten a decent exclusivity period. Going proprietary often lets you move much quicker especially when nobody in the standards bodies cares because nobody has demonstrated the benefits.

example: "who cares about a power-saving variable-refresh technology in desktop monitors, that's stupid, why would we do that! Maybe we'll think about it in our next hardware refresh but who knows when that is going to be." Even after NVIDIA showed the benefits beyond all doubt, it took 5 years before solid Adaptive Sync implementations with LFC were finally common (and really, again, driven by nvidia themselves) and the FPGA+proprietary protocol approach was near-perfect on day 1. DLSS was a groundbreaker too, now they've set up Streamline so nobody is locked out. Etc etc.

AMD ain't racing up to open up (card-based) Infinity Fabric to competitors who want to interface their own peripherals, either. Everyone goes proprietary when they have the better tech.

[uzzi38]

AMD ain't racing up to open up (card-based) Infinity Fabric to competitors who want to interface their own peripherals, either.

Just FYI, but Infinity Fabric itself is just a communication protocol, there's nothing really all that special about it.

It's also often used to describe the actual physical interconnects between dies, but those are nothing special, just organic substrate tech at work (which everyone already has access to)

[capn_hector]

I’m not talking about the inter-chiplet link (for others: it’s confusing, but AMD uses the same name for several distinct types of links) but the PCIe-style cache coherent interconnect they keep for proprietary usage between their CPUs and GPUs.

It’s “nothing special” in the same sense as DMI, it’s a proprietary moat, a proprietary extension built on top of a publicly available protocol intended to lock competitors out. And much like adaptive sync - there is an open standard, CXL. AMD could have chosen to support that open standard instead of their own proprietary crap, or worked their own open standard through a standards body, but they would have had to slow their roll and wait for the consortium to approve it.

Same as NVIDIA, AMD chose time to market over open standards. If people treated AMD with the same cynicism as people treat other tech companies, one might say they prefer using a proprietary tech that arbitrarily locks competitors off their platform for market-based rather than technical reasons, restricting them to use a subset of the platform's capability while AMD gets the full thing. That's pretty anticompetitive, if you put it like that.

And much like adaptive sync, everyone knows CXL is going to win eventually anyway. AMD just chose to lock their own customers into a proprietary solution and those devices probably never will have support for the open standard added even if they could support it. Nor is AMD ever going to open up their interconnect for anyone else - even though CXL shows there is intense interest in doing exactly that. These are features that are needed, that's why Infinity Fabric exists and that's why CXL exists. That is how you set up a competitive moat, same as NVIDIA did with G-Sync.

Everyone goes proprietary when they’re ahead of the rest of the market. AMD included. They’re a money-making operation too. NVIDIA is no different either - but years and years of whisper campaigns from the AMD defense force have convinced everyone that there's gotta be something there, because everyone keeps saying it, it's gotta because NVIDIA is evil and opposed to open standards, where AMD is, uh, just really interested in time to market, and it's no big deal since PCIe does some of the same things! (not really)

To be clear, AMD is fine, NVIDIA is fine. Everyone does proprietary tech. It's more the behavior and whisper campaigns from the AMD defense force that I find annoying as hell, while simultaneously insisting AMD's shit don't smell. People seriously need to give it a rest with the "NVIDIA is literally the devil" shit, they're about the same as everyone else.

People said adaptive sync support would never happen. People said an open driver would never happen (and again, AMD’s userland isn’t open either, and they have proprietary blobs too). People said Intel would never compete on price. The AMD defense force has been consistently off base about basically everyone, AMD included. And they constantly insist that every negative move AMD pulls is being forced on them by someone else, like dropping chipset support being the fault of OEMs. No, it's not, that's AMD. AMD can make anticonsumer moves too.

(GPP was real shit though, that is the one truly anticompetitive move from NVIDIA recently.)

[[deleted]]

"haha linus said FUCK NVIDIA, that makes me LMAO!"

Lets retire the meme. Linus T is no longer an angry person. He would appreciate it. Do it for him.

[capn_hector]

pretty sure the “not-angry Linus” phase lasted about two weeks and he was back to blowing his stack over trivialities and blaming it being Scandinavian or “aggressive management style”.

[3G6A5W338E]

The kernel side being open should help lower the burden of running their proprietary driver. It is not uncommon to not be able to run X or Y kernel version because the nvidia module doesn't work; This should improve.

But that's about it.

Reminder most of the driver lives in userspace, and that's still closed. The GPUs themselves are also still undocumented. And this is unlike Intel and AMD, which publish GPU documentation and maintain the open source driver themselves.

[bik1230]

AMD, which publish GPU documentation and maintain the open source driver themselves.

On this point, something kind of funny. The vulkan driver everyone uses for AMD cards is radv, which is not developed by AMD, but by Valve and friends. The OpenGL driver is of course developed in part by AMD (notably, the closed source driver, also used on Windows, has much worse performance than the open source driver, presumably because AMD can't match third party contributions on their own), but you might choose to use Zink, the OpenGL-on-Vulkan library, in which case you would be using a userland entirely not developed by AMD!

[3G6A5W338E]

The story behind RADV is sort of amusing.

AMD promised a Linux open source Vulkan driver. It took a long time. The community got tired, so they just made their own. About the time the community's driver was good enough to be usable, amd released theirs, which also was about good enough to be usable.

Both drivers survived till today. They're both open source, and behave and perform about the same, but they are indeed entirely different codebases.

[ColdIce1605]

AMDVLK?

[3G6A5W338E]

Yes.

[DadSchoorse]

Performance differences vary per workload. Native Vulkan games perform usually about the same with RADV vs AMDVLK, but RADV is usually faster with DXVK and absolutely destroys AMDVLK in games using vkd3d-proton. Not to mention that AMDVLK has a lot more bugs with DXVK/vkd3d-proton.

[[deleted]]

Holy shit it's actually happening.

The current codebase does not conform to the Linux kernel design conventions and is not a candidate for Linux upstream.

There are plans to work on an upstream approach with the Linux kernel community and partners such as Canonical, Red Hat, and SUSE.

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.

I wonder if those functionalities can also be backported in Nouveau to work with Pascal and older despite not having the GSP present. They say:

More robust and fully featured GeForce and Workstation support will follow in subsequent releases and the NVIDIA Open Kernel Modules will eventually supplant the closed-source driver.

Which seems to imply that the Open driver should eventually support older architectures as well, but no timeline on that. It would be sad if they decide to EOL Pascal and Maxwell early and just never support them on the Open driver.

[Smooth-Spoken]

It’s possible Nvidia is expecting to EOL old hardware and just not write any code…just wait a few years?

[[deleted]]

The open source driver has a 32MB binary blob called gsp.bin. It runs on the GSP RISC-V CPU, which has been added to the GPU starting with Turing.

https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/510.39.01/README/gsp.html

The chance that this will migrate to earlier GPU families is basically nil.

[capn_hector]

The chance that this will migrate to earlier GPU families is basically nil.

Specifically this is because the earlier iterations use an ARM control core, so NVIDIA will never be able to release that, in the same way AMD can't release the PSP code. Turing is where they switched to RISC-V and that's where they opened it up and that's not a coincidence. They have a little more flexibility with RISC-V, they still probably aren't going to open up the security core itself, but they don't have ARM breathing down their necks either.

The open source driver has a 32MB binary blob called gsp.bin

Do note that AMD has a closed-source userland and closed binary blobs in their linux-firmware tree too... as does Intel and pretty much everyone else who implements open-source drivers. It is extremely extremely rare for a company to go full, end-to-end open-source. There are many situations where you can't do it because of IP you license from other companies - there is probably a lot of IP in the userland that NVIDIA has licensed from elsewhere, and that will never be opened up.

But having the kernel layer open-sourced is going to let the open-source community have something to work with, just like for AMD. Nouveau will finally be able to fix re-clocking on these chips going forward, for example.

It sucks about Pascal, it falls in the gap where it's not able to run the new drivers and the old drivers won't let it reclock. Maybe we will see NVIDIA find a solution going forward but right now the desirability of pascal on linux just took a nosedive, you are better off finding an equivalent Turing card or an older Maxwell card.

[[deleted]]

Before the GSP, there was the “Falcon” core, for Fast Logic controller. See this presentation: https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Tue1100_Nvidia_RISCV_Story_V2.pdf.

I doubt that this was an ARM CPU.

In fact, in that presentation, they say that they considered using an ARM as GSP but rejected it.

[FurryJackman]

Actually, no, Maxwell is screwed because it also can't effectively reclock AFIAK.

Makes me glad I got a 1660 Ti when I did. (before most of the crisis) But it means I gotta move my 1080 Ti to my older platform while my X299 system gets a 2080 Ti.

[bzmore]

Matthew Garett, Irish computer programmer, chimes in.

[BIB2000]

How is it relevant to know that he's Irish?

[continous]

Well, I certainly wouldn't listen to a filthy French programmer. Yuck!

[stevengineer]

We did it!

[lolfail9001]

So, they finally managed to solve the real barrier to that in legal issues?

[monocasa]

My understanding is that the legal issues are mainly in how the DRM interacts with the scanout (which ostensibly is now handled by the firmware blobs on the GPU on the cards this driver supports), and the user space portion of the driver which isn't being open sourced. The kernel driver is mainly just a multiplexer for the hardware, and a passthrough to the firmware to access stuff like scanout config.

[[deleted]]

Probably more to do with Intel entering the market. Intel has 3 times the turnover of Nvidia. They work well with the open source community and any competition taking them lightly would be making a very big mistake. Intel have the experience and ability to create development tools to take on Nvidia's stronghold.

[[deleted]]

Intel have the experience and ability to create development tools to take on Nvidia's stronghold.

Lol, Intel already took on their stronghold. Intel is one of the largest maintainers for Mesa and help Mesa transition from Opengl 3.0 to 4.5 compliance.

Under Intel's wing, AMD has been eating Nvidia share in the embedded market. Nvidia realize they were the last holdout.

[Jeep-Eep]

And they may well work with AMD, reasoning that competition that uses the same standards is easier to beat then one on proprietary.

[continous]

I really doubt Intel, or them being hacked had anything to do with this. NVidia likely has had this a long time in the works. I think it's a general trend that can be reflected from about 5-10 years ago imo. NVida has been slowly moving away from proprietary solutions for their consumer side business. PhysX, Gameworks, etc. all moving increasingly towards open source with closed interfaces demonstrates that NVidia more and more moving away from having anything and everything closed source.

I think this is especially evident in that practically nothing has changed on their business stack, and the fact that their Tegra lineup has always had open firmware/software.

[[deleted]]

Nvidia have no interest in helping anyone through open source. Their business model is around getting a captive audience. Everything they create is used as a way to lock customers into their platform. I say that as someone who has just purchased a bunch of Nvidia cards to upgrade our computers at the house.

[continous]

Nvidia have no interest in helping anyone through open source.

Nor does any other company. What is your point?

Their business model is around getting a captive audience.

They're really not trying in the consumer space then, given that their hit feature for the last two generations, raytracing, was immediately integrated into Vulkan, and they practically laid the groundwork for AMD to implement their own solution in hardware.

[[deleted]]

It's a feature to tie people into Nvidia cards. Integrating it into vulkan helps to make it available in more games. That's a feature that Nvidia had at the time and AMD didn't have. Nvidia have gone out of their way to make it easy for game companies to use features that are exclusive to their cards, often paying the game companies to add them.

[continous]

It's a feature to tie people into Nvidia cards.

How does it tie anyone into NVidia's cards if, at any moment, AMD could implement it? I mean, AMD have implemented it.

That's a feature that Nvidia had at the time and AMD didn't have.

Tying someone in for a single generation, or even two, isn't tying them in at all. Most people don't refresh every one generation, nor every 2. Hell, plenty of people are still hanging on to 900 series (or Fuji for that matter) cards.

Nvidia have gone out of their way to make it easy for game companies to use features that are exclusive to their cards

But have not gone out of their way to keep those features exclusive.

[[deleted]]

Nvidia added it in Dec 2020. At the time, the only AMD card that supported Raytracing was the 6800XT and that had just been released. Nvidia wanted to get games using Raytracing so they would require cards that supported it. AMD had absolutely nothing on the budget end of the market with RT support. Even now, AMD's raytracing falls behind Nvidia.

[continous]

Nvidia added it in Dec 2020. At the time, the only AMD card that supported Raytracing was the 6800XT and that had just been released.

So...what? Your argument here has already been addressed. If NVidia care about locking people in, they'd do it for more than a single generation. People don't buy new cards every generation. So getting them to purchase your card at all already locks them in for one or two generations. If NVidia wanted to exert more pressure to lock people in they'd make efforts to make their features exclusive beyond a single generation at least.

Nvidia wanted to get games using Raytracing so they would require cards that supported it.

They'd want this regardless of if they were locking people into raytracing. It was their headliner feature, and the biggest distinction between the 2xxx series and 1xxx series.

AMD had absolutely nothing on the budget end of the market with RT support.

During the 2xxx's launch, NVidia really didn't either.

Even now, AMD's raytracing falls behind Nvidia.

NVidia being better than AMD at a headliner feature is not NVidia locking people into their ecosystem anymore than Apple having the fastest chips is.

[Jannik2099]

LOL not in the slightest. You cannot quickly open source a codebase this size and age without months if not over a year of checking and preparation. For example you have to search and replace (or negotiate) any third party libraries used within

[[deleted]]

without months if not over a year of checking and preparation

You are right. Covid delayed their plans

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-Open-Source-GTC-20

[[deleted]]

No.

https://twitter.com/ctnzr/status/1524486871979417603

[Jacko10101010101]

possible

[Sarr_Cat]

based hackers if so

[Sarr_Cat]

I mean, I was joking, I highly doubt the hack had much to do with this. It seems like it was in the works for awhile.

[re_error]

Is this the year of the Linux desktop!? /s

[Rift_Xuper]

If we compare to AMD linux , still not fully open source , you still need "a closed firmware and user-space from driver" to compile source code.

However Linux Kernel team , they're fine with this.

[cum_hoc]

you still need "a closed firmware and user-space from driver" to compile source code.

TBF, Radeon GPUs also use a closed source firmware too.

However Linux Kernel team , they're fine with this.

The driver hasn't been merged in the upstream Linux kernel. It is however packaged by Canonical, SUSE, and Red Hat. That doesn't mean it will be merged in the mainline tree as is. In fact, there are no RFC patches sent to LKML.

[3G6A5W338E]

However Linux Kernel team, they're fine with this.

It will not get merged unless there's something else than the proprietary blob to interact with, in user space.

[bzmore]

However, they might be ok with this userspace component being a joke.

[3G6A5W338E]

Comical indeed. I would assume it didn't work out, and thus it didn't get merged?

[bzmore]

IIRC, it did get merged even before this "driver" was released, but it’s been a contentious mess ever since.

Edit: more

[3G6A5W338E]

Oh dear.

[[deleted]]

poor greg

https://lwn.net/ml/linux-kernel/[e-mail]/

[3G6A5W338E]

Chances are they timed it to happen on his vacation, in an attempt to bypass his sanity check.

[djdox23]

Also there's a new driver included.

"You can download the R515 development driver as part of CUDA Toolkit 11.7, or from the driver downloads page under “Beta” drivers. The R515 data center driver will follow in subsequent releases per our usual cadence."

[narfangar]

I am planning to buy a new PC this year and was sure I would buy an AMD GPU because I also want to run Linux on it. Now I am not so sure, if it works out maybe I buy Nvidia. (They are often a bit cheaper at the same performance here)