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NVIDIA Transitions Fully Towards Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules | NVIDIA Technical Blog
(developer.nvidia.com)
Fucking finally.
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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I guess the people buying pallets of $50,000 cards have had words with Nvidia over their shitty closed-source Linux drivers. It's not like Nvidia have suddenly decided to care about Linux gamers.
Is... is this the year of the Linux desktop?
For me it is. I migrated my wife last week and mine is next week. AI spying is the last straw for me.
I see you're using your wife as a test user for yourself. Smart.
What distro u go with?
Mint. Cinnamon for my wife. Probably the same for me, though I'm debating XFCE.
Good choice. Im on arch with xfce btw. I like xfce but it looks a little dated the lightweightness is great tho. Ive been considering moving to a tiling manager but havnt had the time energy or effort to set that up especially since i need to migrate to wayland and thats gonna be a whole pain.
If you know fuck all about Linux I think maybe Mint is pretty good but I kept having issues with the auto updater so I'm on Ubuntu - where I'm also having issues with the auto updater, so just ignore that shit and update from the shell. In which case Mint is still probably the most windows-user friendly, but I don't know that it's by a huge margin or anything.
I know a lot more than fuck all about Linux, but I'm also super lazy, so Mint is a good option.
I also want something that my wife finds easy. She's now on her second week, and only one issue which she rebooted and it went away. After that, there is benefit to making mine like hers in case I ever need her to do something when I'm away and don't have remote access.
It's been the year of the linux desktop every year so far, since i've switched my machines to it. It is what you make of it
Gooby pls
Back in 2004
You’re welcome everyone, I just bought an AMD card to replace the buggy NVIDIA card I’m using on arch btw.
Thank you for your service o7
I would, but a built a SFF build two years ago that supported my 2080ti. Now, no new cards will fit in my case. I ride it til it dies, but I can run Wayland as of about a month ago, so that's nice.
We're open sourcing our drivers since Radeon has been doing that for decades now.
AMchaD
Isn't it actually because they moved most of their driver code onto the card itself or something?
Only 2000-series cards and newer are supported, but this is definitely a good change
Makes me wonder if there was some critical component of the pre-rtx cards that they couldn't open for some reason
I'm guessing the whole point of this is to boost AI. Pre-RTX have no tensor cores, therefore it would be a waste of time to open source.
I guess it's the GSP which isn't there on the pre rtx cards. Also, most of the stuff is moved into the firmware as a blob (hence the need for the GSP) so the drivers are not really open open. But it's still a refreshing move
Call me Mr Cynical, but I'd guess that most of the super secret licensed proprietary stuff was moved to the firmware rather than being in the drivers.
I was kind of hoping that Pascal and Volta would still be included, given how much of a userbase still has those, however from Nvidia's standpoint, I can kind of see it? These are almost a decade old. But either way, i'm sure they have some other corporate bullshit in mind
2000 series is pretty old
Hey that's pretty good, 2000 series really isn't that new.
Can't wait for my 3060 laptop to get those drivers
Is this really as good as it sounds? There's some parts of the article that concern me:
The initial release targeted datacenter compute GPUs
Not every GPU is compatible with the open-source GPU kernel modules.
Is there any chance that this just means only a certain class of GPU's are ever going to support open source, while their mainline desktop GPU's will still be proprietary?
Not trying to spread FUD, but I don't want to get too excited until I know for sure that this means they will support open source drivers on all their future desktop GPU's.
All GPUs released since they came out with the RTX 2000+ line are supported and all new GPUs will most likely have support, especially with this announcement saying they're committed to it. There's a support list on their GitHub and it includes all the weird little things you'd be worried about. Even silly little laptop chips like the new RTX 500 are on it.
I think the only reason they limited GPU support is because the older ones physically don't have the hardware for this approach; they switched to their newer RISC-V "GSP" processors with the RTX line. In the new open module, all of their proprietary "secret sauce" was shoved off to firmware running on that new GSP. Previously, their proprietary kernel module loaded all of that same secret sauce as a gigantic obfuscated blob running on your normal CPU instead. The Windows side of their driver has also been moving towards using the GSP, they even advertised it boosts performance or whatever, and I can believe it.
That said, with this new stuff, the official Nvidia userland portions providing Vulkan/OpenGL/CUDA support and the like are still proprietary. It's still worse than AMD in that regard. But at least it's possible to replace those bits, and Mesa/NVK are working on getting Vulkan up and running (with NVK supposedly getting pretty damn good, and Mesa's OpenGL-on-Vulkan is pretty good too so that's free).
Ah ok, so it's just the kernel part that they're open sourcing, but a proprietary driver will still need to be installed just as before. I knew there had to be a catch.
I guess it's nice that this would help with kernel issues, like graphics breaking when you install a new kernel. But still not quite what I was hoping for.
This is pretty huge. NVIDIA has been the broadcom wireless chip of the modern era, causing unnecessary end-user pain and preventing every day users from migrating to Linux due to hardware that's semi-compatible that doesn't always work out of the box. I've been using AMD for their open source support for a while now, but this is a welcome change to enable others to switch - or at the very least test - a fully working Linux OS without having to fight to get things working.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHH!!!!
FINALLY!
That's cool to hear
I'm looking forward to seeing more than just data center GPUs hit the open source list
Damn, that’s a HUGE win. I’m really glad Nvidia decided to go open source on this stuff. Not something I was expecting, if I’m honest.
Call me when they manage to get it up streamed into the kernel
That's good but somehow I don't think they are going to give up printing money
They got a better license to fabricate money.
I can't help but remember the big hack that happened where this is one of the things they demanded lol. That'll never be leverage again.
Been planning on replacing my 980Ti with an AMD card. Maybe I'll stick with team green now. Can anyone give me an opinion against that?
AMD is going to work better and is more open.
Can you elaborate a little? What makes AMD more open than Nvidia now that Nvidia is transitioning to open source drivers? And does AMD work better simply due to longer time in development?
From what i understand, they're not transitioning to open source usermode drivers, just FOSS kernel modules for newer GPUs.
"Transitioning" means nothing today. They are likely going to still have a ton of proprietary components. AMD does as well but the driver itself is part of the kernel. They work and will continue to work as AMD GPU support is built in.
it will probably be less performant than the windows drivers for at least another couple of years, if they even follow through without any bullshit in the first place
I'm very excited about this because it means distros can consider shipping fully signed drivers built by the maintainers instead of this (what I consider to be) DKMS jankiness that builds the source part of the modules locally. I prefer to run with secure boot enabled, but the MOK system DKMS requires seems like an escape hatch. By default the signing keys are just another file on the same system. That's really not a good way to run secure boot.
We can even talk about upstreaming the drivers with the GPL-compatible licensing. That's huge.
Not including Pascal btw. And considering how buggy my PC (NVidia) is compared to my Laptop (HD Intel), I will still use AMD. Also because it will take years until the open source driver will have reached the stability, integrity and quality the AMD driver has due to contributions of Linux people.
Holy shit. The year of the linux desktop. All kidding aside this is a huge step.