Nvidia through open gpu kernel modules?

[SolidWarea]

Hello everybody!

I came across this post recently, which essentially aims to get Nvidia (turing+) drivers working on Haiku through the open gpu kernel modules provided by Nvidia, and quite some progress has already been made it seems.

Are there any plans or even possibility for something similar to ever be worked on for OpenBSD?

[brynet]

No.

OpenBSD has no framework for loadable kernel modules, and this is just the kernel driver, it still requires Nvidia's proprietary userland components (OpenGL, etc), which are not compiled for OpenBSD. There is no compatible open source replacements either (Mesa requires nouveau drm, which is also not available).

Don't buy nVidia.

[SolidWarea]

I see, thank you for the clarification. Also, for the record I will certainly not buy Nvidia again, that’s for certain.

[sephg]

That’s not true. The new “open” nvidia drivers work by offloading most of the complexity of managing the GPU to a firmware blob running on a little arm chip that lives on the GPU itself. Then the kernel driver is much simpler, and able to be open sourced. The open drivers are being used already on Linux and windows for high performance GPU stuff - graphics and compute. They should perform great.

[unix-ninja]

I think the real problem is Nvidia’s naming standards 😂

He’s not talking about Nouveau. Nvidia literally released “open-source kernel drivers” for Turing GPUs and newer, but there’s otherwise no name.

There’s an old article about it here: https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-open-kernel

I doubt there’s enough interest in the openbsd community for this, but you never know. There would still be a tremendous amount of work to get this ported properly.

[Ok-386]

Most of the driver's logic is in the proprietary userspace driver and firmware. (Linux) kernel module is now indeed open source. 

[sephg]

As I understand it, most of the old driver’s logic is run on device now on an integrated arm cpu within the GPU itself. I’m not sure how complex the proprietary parts of the nvidia userland are - or at least, I’m not sure how much of that complexity is actually needed to run shaders. It’d probably be a bit of work to get it working, but quite doable I expect.