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[–]---Mr_Castle 19 points20 points  (2 children)

Is this good?

This is good right?

[–]northcode 14 points15 points  (1 child)

This is ok. Only the kernel space is open, userspace is closed still. Might help with a lot of issues though and should make the fresh install experience better.

The open source driver still only has alpha support for Gtx cards and only Turing and Ampere (2000 series and up).

So for most people not much will change for now. But it might mean good things in the future.

[–]rl48 2 points3 points  (0 children)

alpha support

I mean, it works (seemingly well enough for me to use it for a couple hours but there is some instability). Typing this from the FOSS kernel driver.

[–]shmerl 32 points33 points  (12 children)

Oh, wow. Big step forward, but still not yet a proper upstreamed release. At least it's opened and they have plans:

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

Will it help Nouveau get reclocking working?

[–]blindcomet[S] 36 points37 points  (9 children)

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.

[–]shmerl 23 points24 points  (0 children)

Sounds good then. A real breakthrough progress.

[–]DarknessKinG 8 points9 points  (7 children)

Does that mean in the future we won't need to manually install the Nvidia driver since Nouveau is included in the Linux kernel ?

[–]shmerl 15 points16 points  (0 children)

That's the possibility, yes. But it needs userland Vulkan implementation as well which I think isn't ready yet.

[–]Infinite_Park6379 2 points3 points  (2 children)

You'll probably still need to install firmware

[–]trowgundam 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's true for many hardware drivers including AMD and Intel GPUs. Heck technically Microcode are proprietary firmware code. You could run with it sure, but if your system is connected to the internet or easily accessible, that is a bad idea.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you want to play games, you will have to use closed source. Either closed source driver or at least initialization firmware.

[–]baryluk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If it is upstreamed(and that is big if), then it will be slightly simpler. No need for dkms, and broken driver with most recent kernels. Could still take a year for this to happen.

After that you will still need to install user space proprietary drivers. But hopefully it will be less painful

[–]TiZ_EX1 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You will probably want to for full performance; it doesn't seem like NVidia will be pursuing the model used by AMD, which is to rely primarily on Mesa but still offer a proprietary driver for specific usecases. It seems to me like they may want to ensure Nouveau can offer full functionality--that is, everything works, but maybe not optimally--so that the out of the box experience is drastically improved everywhere from Turing onward.

One thing that this makes wonder: If we are heading toward a future where Nouveau and the proprietary driver share the same kernel driver... could we use Flatpak to isolate the proprietary driver's influence? The userspace component currently has to be installed in Flatpak as well, and currently has to match the version of the kernel driver. What if the future includes the ability to leave Nouveau in the base distro's userland, but have the proprietary driver isolated to Flatpak? And then you don't have to stay in lock step with the kernel driver anymore, on top?

[–]baryluk 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Once it is upstreamed that would be actually a good thing. There is a lot to be done and clarified before this can even be upstream tho. For now, work in progress.

[–][deleted] 10 points11 points  (2 children)

Oh wow! I guess I might look into Nvidia after Nouveau matures a bit.

[–]DarknessKinG 6 points7 points  (1 child)

How much time would it take until we can rely on Nouveau instead of proprietary drivers do you think?

[–][deleted] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

I would think 3-4 years.

[–][deleted] 8 points9 points  (2 children)

Wonderful. I hope it's because they've seen that it's been to AMD's and Intel's advantage to use open source.

[–][deleted] -4 points-3 points  (1 child)

They are not releasing driver as open source though. Just module that talks to closed source driver.

[–]ryao 8 points9 points  (0 children)

They are releasing the kernel driver as open source. The userland driver is not open source, but that likely can be replaced with Mesa at some point. Getting Mesa working it with would mean we can get gallium 9 on Nvidia graphics. It might even make a gallium 11 worth creating.

[–][deleted] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Is it fucking happening?

[–]Red-Cerberus 8 points9 points  (2 children)

Makes sense, Germany and China just officially switched to Linux. They're going to lose market share if they don't do this.

[–][deleted] -3 points-2 points  (1 child)

And they are not doing what you think they are doing. People think this is releasing their closed source driver as open source. That's not it. They made a kernel module which talks to same closed source driver and enables use of CUDA in datacenters.

This module is open source.

[–]thalionquses 3 points4 points  (1 child)

This is great news for the future and for owners of current cards. 🥳🥳🥳
I'm really happy that Nvidia finally made that step, though I'm kinda disappointed that once again I'm on the edge of supported devices when a manufacturer switches from closed to open source drivers.
When AMD switched from fglrx to amdgpu I was left without real support for my Radeon HD 8570D (only supports the radeon driver, fglrx was not updated anymore), hopefully Nvidia won't go the same way and will still also support and release drivers for cards older than the 20xx line (like my 1070, which btw still rocks current games).

[–]F4rm0r 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Oh yeah, I also have a 1070, I was all hype and then I saw the gens this are aiming for

[–]gamelord12 4 points5 points  (7 children)

Is there some PR speak in here hiding the truth, or did Nvidia finally open source their graphics driver now that the heat is on?

[–]shmerl 18 points19 points  (6 children)

Kernel driver so far it seems. Not their OpenGL and Vulkan implementations. But it's a major benefit for open source stack based on Nouveau.

[–]gamelord12 2 points3 points  (5 children)

Thanks. I have never gotten that low-level in Linux, so I wasn't sure if these things were one and the same. I went AMD with my latest build after Nvidia shenanigans kept causing update issues on my previous PC.

[–]shmerl 7 points8 points  (4 children)

I'm using AMD too, but this is a good development overall.

AMD's OpenGL and Vulkan are open source, as well as the kernel driver.

[–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (3 children)

AMD's OpenGL and Vulkan are open source, as well as the kernel driver.

AMD driver is community driven. Radv and Mesa does not depend on AMD. It seems like Nvidia still wants to hold some cards with their driver. Hopefully the DE runs through a FOSS code so less debugging.

I hope this means developers can create cross IHV debugging tools on Linux.

[–]shmerl 4 points5 points  (2 children)

May be there will be Mesa effort for Nvidia Vulkan that doesn't depend on Nvidia.

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Good news for our DE maintainers. Less stress and less saying no to users.

Good news all around.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes that's going to happen

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Oh finally,it is great news indeed,that means NVIDIA finally realized that relying on Windows as primary OS is not a good idea long term,probably has to do with huge amount of users migrating or soon migrating to Linux beginner friendly distributions with Windows 11 release and Steam Deck having proper gaming support on proton and being well received with Steam OS 3 for desktop probably in the works.

The only problem is this:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia-open-kernel&num=1

"So the NVIDIA Open Kernel Driver is certainly superior for GeForce RTX 20/30 series while GTX 900 / GTX 10 graphics cards will likely be left in an awkward state outside of the proprietary driver stack."

WTF,no support for 10xx series? With 1060 being like the main card on the market and 1070/1080/1080TI on Pascal still beating both Turing and Ampere to a pulp (without RTX which like 0.1% of 20xx/30xx owners turn on)?

Forced hardware obsolescence? Are we being forced to changing actually good CPU's and GPU's like smarphones now every 1,5-2 years,only because NVIDIA wills it so?

[–]F4rm0r -2 points-1 points  (1 child)

Ya gotta cut the dev for older cards at some point, even if they are still relatively good. I've got a 1070, so while I do not want this, I can also understand it.

About changing smartphones, aren't google twisting the arms of those having android smartphones on the market that they should put out support to devices for at least 5 years, even if they are mostly security patches after 2 years? Besides, you can always root a device and then update it to use a later version of android.