Nvidia open source kernel driver coming

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honka_animated-128px-32

Weird coincidence…

Well…it’s just modules :unamused: Still beter than nothing

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Not an Nvidia user but is the best news I have had recently :smile:

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It will still take time before we can see the open source nvidia drivers, so not wise to hold anyone’s breath for this…

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Nice!
I was suffocating :dash:

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Would be interesting to hear a comment from mr. Torvalds about this news… :wink:

Hell hath frozen over! Hallelujah! Praise be our binary overlords!

Edit: There’s also this article worth a quick read as well since Phoronix didn’t link to ti:

Edit2: Here’s a Fedora dev’s take on what all this new Nvidia stuff means for open source:

https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2022/05/11/why-is-the-open-source-driver-release-from-nvidia-so-important-for-linux/

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I don’t have time to read the entire article, and parts of it seem to be beyond my scope, so could someone explain to me whether this is about open sourcing the entire nvidia driver, or if ‘kernel driver’ is just a part that is being transitioned, whilst the rest of the driver remains closed?

Keep your eyes on Arch testing… :wink: :shushing_face:

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just the kernel modules get open sourced, the rest stays proprietary.

Fast :fast_forward: … Very fast just seen on tg :joy:

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Oh, hey, I didn’t see you there.

$ modinfo nvidia
filename:       /lib/modules/5.17.6-zen1-1-zen/updates/dkms/nvidia.ko.zst
firmware:       nvidia/515.43.04/gsp.bin
alias:          char-major-195-*
version:        515.43.04
supported:      external
license:        NVIDIA
srcversion:     A99F76B0A4794D026A93B6E
...
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Oh it’s in testing now :wink:

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https://archlinux.org/packages/?sort=&repo=Testing&q=nvidia&maintainer=&flagged=

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we have some users here with the hardware needed to test this i think ?
Don’t be afraight to help testing if you are able to!!

I can’t my gt 710 is Kepler
image

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From what I’ve gathered, this is already in the work for some years. I doubt this is related to the ransom demand.

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I think so too.

We were told about this release date long before the hackers hit. In fact our first reaction hearing about the hack was the opposite, we feared it would cause NVidia to delay due to the fear of people believing they could be blackmailed. Luckily NVidia stuck with their plan.

Source: This tweet by Christian Schaller (Red Hat’s Director for Desktop, Graphics, Infotainment & i18n)
Copy & paste from reddit.

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This is a pretty good read.

According to this the open source drivers are primarily for CUDA use and don’t yet contain everything needed to be used as display drivers.

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My understanding is that

  1. They removed all the roadblocks in front of Nouveau so it can now fully unleash the potential of Nvidia GPUs.
  2. They released the kernel stack only. This does not include Vulkan/OpenGL etc. but includes CUDA. Teleasing the kernel stack means nvidia modules will be just like any other module and can be signed for Secure (!) Boot. Hopefully we will have no Nvidia DKMS in the future.
  3. Currently Quadro stuff and RTX 20xx and 30xx is supported, in the future all the GPUs currently supported by driver 510 will be supported.

Time to boot up Arch Linux :grin:

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from what i understand of it they moved most of the functionality to firmware which is still closed and then just made this which calls to the firmware.

I feel like this has less little to do with any open source initiative and more to do with getting around license issues and not having kernel devs take a fat dump on their parade.

I would prefer they just contribute to Nouveau and make a decent open source driver vs doing their own thing and moving 90% of the functionality to closed firmware blobs. The community has been giving them kudos for this but i dont see them really contributing like Intel or AMD do for example. It remains to be seen but i feel this is just a tactic to dodge previous issues they had regarding the kernel and their shims. Hector Martin pointed out this seems to be more like what Broadcom has done except less extreme, broadcom has he entire driver in firmware.

a bit on it from Hector Martin who works on M1 support and others like PS4, etc.

https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1524615058688724992

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