15 ms·

NVIDIA Transitions Fully Towards Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Modules

881 points by shaicoleman 2y ago

enoeht 2y ago
didn't they say that many times before?
- vlovich123 2y ago
  Not sure but with the Turing series they support having a cryptographically signed binary blob that they load on the GPU. So before where their kernel driver was a thin shim for the user space driver, now it’s a thin shim for the black box firmware loaded on the GPU
  - p_l 2y ago
    the scope of what the kernel interface provides didn't change, but what was previously a blob wrapped by source-provided "os interface layer" is now moved to run on GSP (RISC-V based) inside the GPU.
hypeatei 2y ago
How is the NVIDIA driver situation on Linux these days? I built a new desktop with an AMD GPU since I didn't want to deal with all the weirdness of closed source or lacking/obsolete open source drivers.
- tadasv 2y ago
  great. rtx 4090 works out of the box after installing drivers from non-free. That's on debian bookworm.
- jppittma 2y ago
  4070 worked out of the box on my arch system. I used the closed source drivers and X11 and I've not encountered a single problem. My prediction is that it will continue to improve if only because people want to run nvidia on workstations.
- jcranmer 2y ago
  I built my new-ish computer with an AMD GPU because I trusted in-kernel drivers better than out-of-kernel DKMS drivers. That said, my previous experience with the DKMS driver stuff hasn't been bad. If you use Nvidia's proprietary driver stack, then things should generally be fine. The worst issues are that Nvidia has (historically, at least; it might be different for newer cards) refused to implement some graphics features that everybody else uses, which means that you basically need entirely separate codepaths for Nvidia in window managers, and some of them have basically said "fuck no" to doing that.
- mepian 2y ago
  The current stable proprietary driver is a nightmare on Wayland with my 3070, constant flickering and stuttering everywhere. Apparently the upcoming version 555 is much better, I'm sticking with X11 until it comes out. I never tried the open-source one yet, not sure if it supports my GPU at all.
  - llmblockchain 2y ago
    I have a 3070 on X and it has been great.
    - levkk 2y ago
      Same setup here. Multiple displays don't work well for me. One of the displays doesn't often get detected after resuming screen saver.
      - llmblockchain 2y ago
        I have two monitors connected to the 3070 and it works well. The only issue I had was suspending, the GPU would "fall of the bus" and not get its power back when the PC woke up. I had to add the kernel line "pcie_aspm=off" to prevent the GPU from falling asleep. So... not perfect, but it works.
        josephg 2y ago
        Huh. I’m using 2 monitors connected to a 4090 on Linux mint - which is still using X11. It works flawlessly, including DPI scaling. Wake from sleep is fine too. I haven’t tried wayland yet. Sounds like it might be time soon given other comments in this thread.
  - misterbishop 2y ago
    this is resolved in 555 (currently running 555.58.02). my asus zephyrus g15 w/ 3060 is looking real good on Fedora 40. there's still optimizations needed around clocking, power, and thermals. but the graphics presentation layer has no issues on wayland. that's with hybrid/optimus/prime switching, which has NEVER worked seamlessly for me on any laptop on linux going back to 2010. gnome window animations remain snappy and not glitchy while running a game. i'm getting 60fps+ running baldurs gate 3 @ 1440p on the low preset.
- anon291 2y ago
  I've literally never had an issue in decades of using NVIDIA and linux. They're closed source, but the drivers work very consistently for me. NVIDIA's just the only option if you want something actually good and to run ML workloads as well.
  - sqeaky 2y ago
    > but the drivers work very consistently for me The problem with comments like this is that you never know if you will be me or you on your graphics card or laptop. I have tried nvidia a few times and kept getting burnt. AMD just works. I don't get the fastest ML machine, but I am just a tinkerer there and OpenCL works fine for my little toy apps and my 7900XTX blazes through every wine game. If you need it professionally than you need it, warts an all. For any casual user that 10% extra gaming performance needs to weighed against reliability.
    - Workaccount2 2y ago
      It also depends heavily on the user. A mechanic might say "This car has never given me a problem" because the mechanic doesn't consider cleaning an idle bypass circuit or adjusting valve clearances to be a "problem". To 99% percent of the population though, those are expensive and annoying problems because they have no idea what those words even mean, much less the ability to troubleshoot, diagnose, and repair.
      - chasil 2y ago
        If you use a search engine for "Torvalds Nvidia" you will discern a certain attitude towards Nvidia as a corporation and its products. This might provide you a suggestion that alternate manufacturers should be considered. I have confirmed this to be the case on Google and Bing, so DuckDuckGo and Startpage will also exhibit this phenomena.
        Dylan16807 2y ago
        An opinion on support from over ten years ago is not a very strong suggestion.
- art0rz 2y ago
  I've been running Arch with KDE under Wayland on two different laptops both with NVIDIA GPUs using proprietary drivers for years and have not run into issues. Maybe I'm lucky? It's been flawless for me.
  - lyu07282 2y ago
    The experiences always vary quite a lot, it depends so much on what you do with it. For example discord doesn't support screen sharing with Wayland, it's just one small example but those can add up over time. Another example is display rotation which was broken in kde for a long time (recently fixed).
- green-salt 2y ago
  Whatever pop_os uses has been quite stable for my 4070.
  - tormeh 2y ago
    Pop uses X by default because of Nvidia.
- segmondy 2y ago
  plug, install then play, I got 3 different Nvidia GPU sets and all running without any issue, nothing crazy to do but follow installation instructions.
  - anonym29 2y ago
    To some of us, running any closed source software in userland qualifies as quite crazy indeed.
- DaoVeles 2y ago
  I have never had an issue with them. That said I typically go mid range on cards so they are usually hardened architecture due to a year or two of being in the high end.
- mathfailure 2y ago
  Depends on the version of drivers: 550 version results into black screen (you have to kill and restart X server) after waking up from sleep. 535 version doesn't have this bug. Don't know about 555. Also tearing is a bitch. Still. Even with ForceCompositionPipeline.
- drdaeman 2y ago
  3090 owner here. Wayland is even worse mess than it normally is. Used to flicker real bad before 555.58.02, less so with the latest driver - but still has some glitches with games. A bunch of older Electron apps still fail to render anything and require hardware acceleration disabled. I gave up trying to make it all work - can't get rid of all the flicker and drawing issues, plus Wayland seems to be a real pain in the ass with HiDPI displays. X11 sort of works, but I had to entirely disable DPMS or one of my monitors never comes back online after going to sleep. I thought it was my KVM messing up, but that happened even with a direct connection... no idea what's going on there. CUDA works fine, save for the regular version compatibility hiccups.
  - senectus1 2y ago
    4070ti super here, X11 is fine, i have zero issues. Wayland is mostly fine, though i get some windowframe glitches when maxing them to the monitor and a another issue that i'm pretty sure is wayland but it has obnly happened a couple of times and it locks the whole device up. I cant prove it yet.
- devwastaken 2y ago
  KDE plasma 6 + Nvidia beta 555 works well. Have to make .desktop files to launch some applications explicitly Wayland.
- adrian_b 2y ago
  I am not using Wayland and I do not have any intention to use it, therefore I do not care for any problems caused by Wayland not supporting NVIDIA and demanding that NVIDIA must support Wayland. I am using only Linux or FreeBSD on all my laptop, desktop or server computers. On desktop and server computers I did not ever have the slightest difficulty with the NVIDIA proprietary drivers, either for OpenGL or for CUDA applications or for video decoding/encoding or for multiple monitor support, with high resolution and high color depth, on either Gentoo/Funtoo Linux or FreeBSD, during the last two decades. I also have AMD GPUs, which I use for compute applications (because they are older models, which still had FP64 support). For graphics applications they frequently had annoying bugs, unlike NVIDIA (however my AMD GPUs have been older models, preceding RDNA, which might be better supported by the open-source AMD drivers). The only computers on which I had problems with NVIDIA on Linux were those laptops that used the NVIDIA Optimus method of coexistence with the Intel integrated GPUs. Many years ago I have needed a couple of days to properly configure the drivers and additional software so that the NVIDIA GPU was selected when desired, instead of the Intel iGPU. I do not know if any laptops with NVIDIA Optimus still exist. The laptops that I bought later had video outputs directly from the NVIDIA GPU, so there was no difference between them and desktops and the NVIDIA drivers worked flawlessly. Both on Gentoo/Funtoo Linux and FreeBSD I never had to do anything else but to give the driver update command and everything worked fine. Moreover, NVIDIA has always provided a nice GUI application "NVIDIA X Server Settings", which provides a lot of useful information and which makes very easy any configuration tasks, like setting the desired positions of multiple monitors. A few years ago there was nothing equivalent for the AMD or Intel GPU drivers, but that might have changed meanwhile.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
  My experience with an AMD iGPU on Linux was so bad that my next laptop will be Intel. Horrible instability to the point where I could reliably crash my machine by using Google Maps for a few minutes, on both Chrome and Firefox. It got fixed eventually - with the next Ubuntu release, so I had a computer where I was afraid to use anything with WebGL for half a year.
- littlecranky67 2y ago
  I got my nvidia 1060 back then during the crypto crysis when the price of AMD GPUs were inflated due to miners. Hesitant and scepital about Linux support, I upgraded the same machine with that GPU since 2016 von Ubuntu 14.04, to 18.04 and now 24.04 - without any nvidia driver issues anytime whatsoever. When I read about issues with nvidias drivers, it is mostly people with rare distro or rolling release ones, with changing kernel versions very frequently and failure to recompile with the binary drivers. For LTS distros you will likely have no issues.
brrrrrm 2y ago
Kernel is an overloaded term for GPUs. This is about the linux kernel
- karamanolev 2y ago
  "... Linux GPU Kernel Modules" is pretty unambiguous to me.
  - brrrrrm 2y ago
    Yep the title was updated.
- brrrrrm 2y ago
  Guh, wish i could delete this now that the title was updated. the original title (shown on the linked page) wasn't super clear
berkeleyjunk 2y ago
As someone who is pretty skeptical and reads the fine print, I think this is a good move and I really do not see a downside (other than the fact that this probably strengthens the nVidia monoculture).
- vlovich123 2y ago
  AFAIK I believe all they did was move the closed source user space driver code to their opaque firmware blob leaving a thin shim in the kernel. In essence I don’t believe that much has really changed here.
  - stkdump 2y ago
    But the firmware runs directly on the hardware, right? So they effectively rearchitected their system to move what used to be 'above' the kernel to 'below' the kernel, which seems like a huge effort.
    - vlovich123 2y ago
      It’s some effort but I bet they added a classical serial CPU to run the existing code. In fact, [1] suggests that’s exactly what they did. I suspect they had other reasons to add the GSP so the amortized cost of moving the driver code to firmware was actually not that large all things considered and in the long term reduces their costs (eg they reduce the burden further of supporting multiple OSes, they can improve performance further theoretically, etc etc) [1] https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/525.78.01/README/gsp.html https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/525.78.01/R...
      - p_l 2y ago
        That's exactly what happened - Turing microarchitecture brought in new[1] "GSP" which is capable enough to run the task. Similar architecture happens AFAIK on Apple M-series where the GPU runs its own instance of RTOS talking with "application OS" over RPC. [1] Turing GSP is not the first "classical serial CPU" in nvidia chips, it's just first that has enough juice to do the task. Unfortunately without recalling the name of the component it seems impossible to find it again thanks to search results being full of nvidia ARM and GSP pages...
bradyriddle 2y ago
I remember Nvidia getting hacked pretty bad a few years ago. IIRC, the hackers threatened to release everything they had unless they open sourced their drivers. Maybe they got what they wanted. [0] https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/nvidia-hackers-allegedly-attempting-to-blackmail-company-into-open-sourcing-gpu-drivers https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/nvidia-hackers-allegedly-...
- nicce 2y ago
  Kernel modules are not user-space drivers which are still proprietary.
  - porphyra 2y ago
    Much of the black magic has been moved from the drivers to the firmware anyway.
  - bradyriddle 2y ago
    Ooops. Missed that part. Re-reading that story is kind of wild. I don't know how valuable what they allegedly got would be (silicon, graphics and chipset files) but the hackers accused Nvidia of 'hacking back' and encrypting their data. Reminds me of a story I heard about Nvidia hiring a private military to guard their cards after entire shipments started getting 'lost' somewhere in asia.
    - spookie 2y ago
      Wait what? That PMC story got me. Where can I find more info on that lmao?
      - bradyriddle 2y ago
        I'd heard the story first hand from a guy in san jose. Never looked it up until now. This is the closest thing I could find to it. In which case it sounds like it's been debunked. [0] https://www.pcgamer.com/no-half-a-million-geforce-rtx-30-series-gpus-were-not-lost-in-shipment-and-now-found/ https://www.pcgamer.com/no-half-a-million-geforce-rtx-30-ser... [1] https://www.geeknetic.es/Noticia/20794/Encuentran-en-Corea-500000-GPUs-RTX-30-de-NVIDIA-que-habian-sido-perdidas.html https://www.geeknetic.es/Noticia/20794/Encuentran-en-Corea-5...
creata 2y ago
Huh. Sway and Wayland was such a nightmare on Nvidia that it convinced me to switch to AMD. I wonder if it's better now. (IIRC the main issue was https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1317 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1317 , which is now complete.)
- modzu 2y ago
  why switch to amd and not just switch to X? :D
  - account42 2y ago
    Why not both?
  - whalesalad 2y ago
    once you go Wayland you usually don’t go back :)
    - Void_Kitty 2y ago
      I tried wayland (on amd) and found it annoying to work with compaired to x11 without any apparent benefits, wayland is definitely the future, but i don't think the future is now
    - kiney 2y ago
      I tested wayland for a while to see what the hype is about. No uoside lits of small workflows broken. Back to Xorg it was.
- snailmailman 2y ago
  Better as of extremely recently. Explicit sync fixes most of the issues with flickering that I’ve had on Wayland. I’ve been using the latest (beta?) driver for a while because of it. I’m using Hyprland though so explicit sync support isn’t entirely there for me yet. It’s actively being worked on. But in the last few months it’s gotten a lot better
Animats 2y ago
NVidia revenue is now 78% from "AI" devices.[1] NVidia's market cap is now US$2.92 trillion. (Yes, trillion.) Only Apple and Microsoft can beat that. Their ROI climbed from about 10% to 90% in the last two years. That growth has all been on the AI side. Open-sourcing graphics drivers may indicate that NVidia is moving away from GPUs for graphics. That's not where the money is now. [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/nvidia-revenue-by-product-line/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/nvidia-revenue-by-product-l... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVDA/nvidia/roi https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVDA/nvidia/roi
- joe_the_user 2y ago
  Well, Nvidia seems to be claiming in the article that this is everything, not just graphics drivers: "NVIDIA GPUs share a common driver architecture and capability set. The same driver for your desktop or laptop runs the world’s most advanced AI workloads in the cloud. It’s been incredibly important to us that we get it just right." And For cutting-edge platforms such as NVIDIA Grace Hopper or NVIDIA Blackwell, you must use the open-source GPU kernel modules. The proprietary drivers are unsupported on these platforms. (These are two most advanced NVIDIA architectures currently)
  - Animats 2y ago
    That's interesting. I've been expecting the AI cards to diverge more from the graphics cards. AI doesn't need triangle fill, Z-buffering, HDMI out, etc. 16 bit 4x4 multiply/add units are probably enough. What's going on in that area?
    - p_l 2y ago
      TL;DR - there seems to be not that much improvement from dropping the "graphics-only" parts of the chip if you already have a GPU instead of breaking into AI market as your first product. 1. nVidia compute dominance is not due to hyperfocus on AI (that's Google's TPU for you, or things like intel's NPU in Meteor Lake), but because CUDA offers considerable general purpose compute. In fact, considerable revenue came and still comes from non-AI compute. This also means that if you figure out a novel mechanism for AI that isn't based around 4x4 matrix addition, or which mixes it with various other operations, you can do them inline. This also includes any pre and post processing you might want to do on the data. 2. The whole advantage they have in software ecosystem builds upon their PTX assembly. Having it compile to CPU and only implement the specific variant of one or two instructions that map to "tensor cores" would be pretty much nonsensical (especially given that AI is not the only market they target with tensor cores - DSP for example is another). Additionally, a huge part of why nvidia built such a strong ecosystem is that you could take cheapest G80-based card and just start learning CUDA. Only some highest-end features are limited to most expensive cards, like RDMA and NVMe integration. Compare this with AMD, where for many purposes only the most expensive compute-only cards are really supported. Or specialized AI only chips that are often programmable either in very low-level way or essentially as "set a graph of large-scale matrix operations that are limited subset of operations exposed by Torch/Tensorflow" (Google TPU, Intel Meteor Lake NPU, etc). 3. CUDA literally began with how evolution of shader model led to general purpose "shader processor" instead of specialized vector and pixel processors. The space taken by specialized hardware for graphics that isn't also usable for general purpose compute is pretty minimal, although some of it is omitted, AFAIK, in compute only cards. In fact, some of the "graphics only" things like Z-buffering are done by the same logic that is used for compute (with limited amount of operations done by fixed-function ROP block), and certain fixed-function graphical components like texture mapping units are also used for high-performance array access. 4. Simplified manufacturing and logistics - nVidia uses essentially the same chips in most compute and graphics cards, possibly with minor changes achieved by changing chicken bits to route pins to different functions (as you mentioned, you don't need DP-outs of RTX4090 on an L40 card, but you can probably reuse the SERDES units to run NVLink on the same pins).
floam 2y ago
NVIDIA Transitions Fully Towards Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules or NVIDIA Transitions Towards Fully Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules?
- j4hdufd8 2y ago
  haven't read it but probably the former
  - throwadobe 2y ago
    "towards" basically negates the "fully" before it for all real intents and purposes
- slashdave 2y ago
  Not much point in a "partially" open-source kernel module.
  - floam 2y ago
    But “fully towards” is pretty ambiguous, like an entire partial implementation. Anyhow I read the article, I think they’re saying fully as in exclusively, like there eventually will not be both a closed source and open source driver co-maintained. So “fully open source” does make more sense. The current driver situation IS partially open source, because their offerings currently include open and closed source drivers and in the future the closed source drivers may be deprecated?
    - einpoklum 2y ago
      See my answer. It's not going to be fully-open-source drivers, it's rather that all drivers will have open-source kernel modules.
      - slashdave 2y ago
        You can argue against proprietary firmware, but is this all that different from other types of devices?
pluto_modadic 2y ago
damn, only for new GPUs.
- mynameisvlad 2y ago
  For varying definitions of "new". It supports Turing and up, which was released in 2018 with the 20xx line. That's two generations back at this point.
sillywalk 2y ago
From the github repo[0]: Most of NVIDIA's kernel modules are split into two components: An "OS-agnostic" component: this is the component of each kernel module that is independent of operating system. A "kernel interface layer": this is the component of each kernel module that is specific to the Linux kernel version and configuration. When packaged in the NVIDIA .run installation package, the OS-agnostic component is provided as a binary: [0] https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules
- p_l 2y ago
  That was the "classic" drivers. The new open source ones effectively move majority of the OS-agnostic component to run as blob on-GPU.
  - arghwhat 2y ago
    Not quite - it moves some logic to the GSP firmware, but the user-space driver is still a significant portion of code. The exciting bits there is the work on NVK.
    - p_l 2y ago
      Yes, I was not including userspace driver in this, as a bit "out of scope" for the conversation :D
benjiweber 2y ago
I wonder if we'll ever get hdcp on nvidia. As much as I enjoy 480p video from streaming services.
- viraptor 2y ago
  Which service goes that low? The ones I know limit you from using 4k, but anything up to 1080p works fine.
  - 9991 2y ago
    Nonsense that a 1080p limit is acceptable for (and accepted by) paying customers.
    - viraptor 2y ago
      Depends. I disagree with HDCP in theory on ideological grounds. In practice, my main movie device is below 720p (projector), so it will take another decade before it affects me in any way.
- ozgrakkurt 2y ago
  Just download it to your pc. It is better user experience and costs less
smcleod 2y ago
So does this mean actually getting rid of the binary blobs of microcode that are in their current ‘open’ drivers?
- p_l 2y ago
  No, it means the blob from the "closed" drivers is moved to run on GSP.
coconut08 2y ago
does this mean you will be able to use NVK/Mesa and CUDA at the same time? The non mesa proprietary side of nvidia's linux drivers are such a mess and NVK is improving by the day, but I really need cuda.
john2x 2y ago
Maybe that’s one way to retain engineers who are effectively millionaires.
deleted 2y ago
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magicloop 2y ago
Remember that time when Linus looked at the camera and gave Nvidia the finger. Has that time now passed? Is it time to reconcile? Or are there still some gotchas?
- jaimex2 2y ago
  These are kernel modules not the actual drivers. So the finger remains up.
jcalvinowens 2y ago
Throwing the tarball over the wall and saying "fetch!" is meaningless to me. Until they actually contribute a driver to the upstream kernel, I'll be buying AMD.
- aseipp 2y ago
  You can just use Nouveau and NVK for that if you just need workstation graphics (and the open-gpu-modules source code/separate GSP release has been a big uplift to Nouveau too, at least.)
  - jcalvinowens 2y ago
    Nouveau is great, and I absolutely admire what the community around it has been able to achieve. But I can't imagine choosing that over AMD's first class upstream driver support today.
  - neop1x 2y ago
    IIRC hardware video decoding of HEVC didn't work for me with nouveau
xyst 2y ago
Nvidia has finally realize they couldn’t write drivers for their own hardware, especially for Linux. Never thought I would see the day.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Suddenly they went from powering gaming to being the winners of the AI revolution; AI is Serious Cloud Stuff, and Serious Cloud Stuff means Linux, so...
shmerl 2y ago
That's not upstream yet. But they supposedly showed some interesting in nova too.
asaiacai 2y ago
I really hope this makes it easier to install/upgrade NVIDIA drivers on Linux. It's a nightmare to figure out version mismatches between drivers, utils, container-runtime...
- einpoklum 2y ago
  From my limited experience with their open-sourcing of kernel modules so far: It doesn't make things easier; but - the silver lining is that, for the most part, it doesn't make installation and configuration harder! Which is no small thing actually.
- riddley 2y ago
  A nightmare how? When i used their cards, I'd just download the .run and run it. Done.
  - jaimex2 2y ago
    After a reboot of coarse :) Everything breaks immediately otherwise.
  - amelius 2y ago
    And when it doesn't work, what do you do then? Exactly, that's when the nightmare starts.
einpoklum 2y ago
The title of this statement is misleading: NVIDIA is not transitioning to open-source drivers for its GPUs; most or all user-space parts of the drivers (and most importantly for me, libcuda.so) are closed-source; and as I understand from others, most of the logic is now in a binary blob that gets sent to the GPU. Now, I'm sure this open-sourcing has its uses, but for people who want to do something like a different hardware backend for CUDA with the same API, or to clear up "corners" of the API semantics, or to write things in a different-language without going through the C API - this does not help us.
qalmakka 2y ago
Well, it is something, even if it's still only the kernel module, and it will be probably never upstreamed anyway.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
CivBase 2y ago
Too late for me. I tried switching to Linux years ago but failed because of the awful state of NVIDIA's drivers. Switched to AMD least year and it's been a breeze ever since. Gaming on Linux with an NVIDIA card (especially an old one) is awful. Of course Linux gamers aren't the demographic driving this recent change of heart so I expect it to stay awful for a while yet.
doctoboggan 2y ago
My guess is Meta and/or Amazon told Nvidia that they would contribute considerable resources to development as long as the results were open source. Both companies bottom lines would benefit from improved kernel modules, and like another commenter said elsewhere, Nvidia doesn't have much to lose.
Narhem 2y ago
I cant wait to use linux without having to spend multiple weekends trying to get the right drivers to work.
aussieguy1234 2y ago
I'll update as soon at its in NixOS unstable. Hopefully this will change the mind of the sway maintainers to start supporting Nvidia cards, I'm using i3 and X but would like to try out Wayland.
jdonaldson 2y ago
It’s kind of surprising that these haven’t just been reverse engineered yet by language models.
- special-K 2y ago
  That's simply not how LLMs work, and are actually awful at reverse engineering of any kind.
  - jdonaldson 2y ago
    Are you saying that they cant explain the contents of machine code in human readable format? Are you saying that they can’t be used in a system that iteratively evaluates combinations of inputs and check their results?
    - tiberious726 2y ago
      Just that they're horrible at it
matheusmoreira 2y ago
Transition is not done until their drivers are upstreamed into the mainline kernel and ALL features work out of the box, especially power management and hybrid graphics.
- CodesInChaos 2y ago
  I thought power management was moved to the GPU firmware in the 20 series, which is why the new driver only supports those?
rldjbpin 2y ago
mind the wording they've used here - "fully towards open-source" and not "towards fully open-source". big difference. almost nobody is going to give you the sauce hidden behind blobs. but i hope the dumb issues of the past (imagine using it on laptops with switchable graphics) go away slowly with this and it is not only for pleasing the enterprise crowd.
n3storm 2y ago
I read "NVIDIA transitions fully Torvalds..."
nikolayasdf123 2y ago
hope linux gets first class open source gpu drivers.. and dare I hope that Go adds native support for GPUs too
gigatexal 2y ago
will this mean that we'll be able to remove the arbitrary distinctions between quadro and geforce cards maybe by hacking some configs or such in the drivers?
Varloom 2y ago
They know CUDA monopoly won't last forever.
- aseipp 2y ago
  CUDA lives in userspace; this kernel driver release does not contain any of that. It's still very useful to release an open source DKMS driver, but this doesn't change anything at all about the CUDA situation.
muhehe 2y ago
What is GPU kernel module? Is it something like a driver for GPU?
- qalmakka 2y ago
  Yes. In modern operating systems, GPU drivers usually consist in kernel component that is loaded inside of the kernel or in a privileged context, and a userspace component that talks with it and implements the GPU-specific part of the APIs that the windowing system and applications use. In the case of NVIDIA, they have decided to drop their proprietary kernel module in favour of an open one. Unfortunately, it's out of tree. In Linux and BSD, you usually get all of your drivers with the system; you don't have to install anything, it's all mostly plug and play. For instance, this has been the case for AMD and Intel GPUs, which have a 100% open source stack. NVIDIA is particularly annoying due to the need to install the drivers separately and the fact they've got different implementations of things compared to anyone else, so NVIDIA users are often left behind by FOSS projects due to GeForce cards being more annoying to work with.
  - muhehe 2y ago
    Thanks. I'm not well versed in these things. It sounded like something you load into GPU (it reminded me old hp printer, which required firmware upload after start).
nicman23 2y ago
they are worthless. the main code is in the userspace
shanoaice 2y ago
There is little meaning for NVIDIA to open-source only the driver portion of their cards, since they heavily rely on proprietary firmware and userspace lib (most important!) to do the real job. Firmware is a relatively small issue - this is mostly same for AMD and Intel, since encapsulation reduces work done on driver side and open-sourcing firmware could allow people to do some really unanticipated modification which might heavily threaten even commercial card sale. Nonetheless at least for AMD they still keep a fair share of work done by driver compared to Nvidia. Userspace library is the worst problem, since they handle a lot of GPU control related functionality and graphics API, which is still kept closed-source. The best thing we can hope is improvement on NVK and RedHat's Nova Driver can put pressure on NVIDIA releasing their user space components.
- gpderetta 2y ago
  It is meaningful because, as you note, it enables a fully opensource userspace driver. Of course the firmware is still proprietary and it increasingly contains more and more logic.
  - matheusmoreira 2y ago
    Doesn't seem like a bad tradeoff so long as the proprietary stuff is kept completely isolated with no access to any other parts of my system.
    - justinclift 2y ago
      Personally, I somewhat wonder about that. The firmware (proprietary) which runs on the gpu seems like it'll have access to do things over the gpu PCIe bus, including read system memory, and access other devices (including network gear). Reading memory of remote hosts (ie RDMA) is also a thing which Nvidia gpus can do.
      - foresto 2y ago
        Is that not solvable using an IOMMU (assuming hardware that has one)?
v3ss0n 2y ago
Thank You Nvidia hacker! You did it! The Lapasu$ team threaten a few years back that if nvidia is not going to release nvidia opensource they are gonna release their code. That lead nvidia to releasing first kernel opensource module in a few months later but it was quite incomplete. Now it seems they are opensourcing fully more.
sylware 2y ago
Hopefully, we get a plain and simple C99 user space vulkan implementation.
exabrial 2y ago
Are Nvidia grace CPUs even available? I thought it was interesting they mentioned that.
resource_waste 2y ago
This means Fedora can bundle it?
gorkish 2y ago
This is great. I've been having to build my own .debs of the OSS driver for some time because of the crapola NVIDIA puts in their proprietary driver that prevents it from working in a VM as a passthrough device. (just a regular whole-card passthru, not trying to use GRID/vGPU on a consumer card or anything) NVIDIA can no longer get away with that nonsense when they have to show their code.
K33P4D 2y ago
Does this mean we can aggressively volt mod, add/replace memory modules to our liking?
svlasov 2y ago
All `g_bindata_k*.c` files are essentially blobs with no source provided: https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/tree/main/src/nvidia/generated https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/tree/main/...

881 points by shaicoleman 2y ago

enoeht 2y ago

didn't they say that many times before?

vlovich123 2y ago
Not sure but with the Turing series they support having a cryptographically signed binary blob that they load on the GPU. So before where their kernel driver was a thin shim for the user space driver, now it’s a thin shim for the black box firmware loaded on the GPU
- p_l 2y ago
  the scope of what the kernel interface provides didn't change, but what was previously a blob wrapped by source-provided "os interface layer" is now moved to run on GSP (RISC-V based) inside the GPU.

hypeatei 2y ago

How is the NVIDIA driver situation on Linux these days? I built a new desktop with an AMD GPU since I didn't want to deal with all the weirdness of closed source or lacking/obsolete open source drivers.

tadasv 2y ago
great. rtx 4090 works out of the box after installing drivers from non-free. That's on debian bookworm.
jppittma 2y ago
4070 worked out of the box on my arch system. I used the closed source drivers and X11 and I've not encountered a single problem. My prediction is that it will continue to improve if only because people want to run nvidia on workstations.
jcranmer 2y ago
I built my new-ish computer with an AMD GPU because I trusted in-kernel drivers better than out-of-kernel DKMS drivers. That said, my previous experience with the DKMS driver stuff hasn't been bad. If you use Nvidia's proprietary driver stack, then things should generally be fine. The worst issues are that Nvidia has (historically, at least; it might be different for newer cards) refused to implement some graphics features that everybody else uses, which means that you basically need entirely separate codepaths for Nvidia in window managers, and some of them have basically said "fuck no" to doing that.
mepian 2y ago
The current stable proprietary driver is a nightmare on Wayland with my 3070, constant flickering and stuttering everywhere. Apparently the upcoming version 555 is much better, I'm sticking with X11 until it comes out. I never tried the open-source one yet, not sure if it supports my GPU at all.
- llmblockchain 2y ago
  I have a 3070 on X and it has been great.
  - levkk 2y ago
    Same setup here. Multiple displays don't work well for me. One of the displays doesn't often get detected after resuming screen saver.
    - llmblockchain 2y ago
      I have two monitors connected to the 3070 and it works well. The only issue I had was suspending, the GPU would "fall of the bus" and not get its power back when the PC woke up. I had to add the kernel line "pcie_aspm=off" to prevent the GPU from falling asleep. So... not perfect, but it works.
      - josephg 2y ago
        Huh. I’m using 2 monitors connected to a 4090 on Linux mint - which is still using X11. It works flawlessly, including DPI scaling. Wake from sleep is fine too. I haven’t tried wayland yet. Sounds like it might be time soon given other comments in this thread.
- misterbishop 2y ago
  this is resolved in 555 (currently running 555.58.02). my asus zephyrus g15 w/ 3060 is looking real good on Fedora 40. there's still optimizations needed around clocking, power, and thermals. but the graphics presentation layer has no issues on wayland. that's with hybrid/optimus/prime switching, which has NEVER worked seamlessly for me on any laptop on linux going back to 2010. gnome window animations remain snappy and not glitchy while running a game. i'm getting 60fps+ running baldurs gate 3 @ 1440p on the low preset.
anon291 2y ago
I've literally never had an issue in decades of using NVIDIA and linux. They're closed source, but the drivers work very consistently for me. NVIDIA's just the only option if you want something actually good and to run ML workloads as well.
- sqeaky 2y ago
  > but the drivers work very consistently for me The problem with comments like this is that you never know if you will be me or you on your graphics card or laptop. I have tried nvidia a few times and kept getting burnt. AMD just works. I don't get the fastest ML machine, but I am just a tinkerer there and OpenCL works fine for my little toy apps and my 7900XTX blazes through every wine game. If you need it professionally than you need it, warts an all. For any casual user that 10% extra gaming performance needs to weighed against reliability.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    It also depends heavily on the user. A mechanic might say "This car has never given me a problem" because the mechanic doesn't consider cleaning an idle bypass circuit or adjusting valve clearances to be a "problem". To 99% percent of the population though, those are expensive and annoying problems because they have no idea what those words even mean, much less the ability to troubleshoot, diagnose, and repair.
    - chasil 2y ago
      If you use a search engine for "Torvalds Nvidia" you will discern a certain attitude towards Nvidia as a corporation and its products. This might provide you a suggestion that alternate manufacturers should be considered. I have confirmed this to be the case on Google and Bing, so DuckDuckGo and Startpage will also exhibit this phenomena.
      - Dylan16807 2y ago
        An opinion on support from over ten years ago is not a very strong suggestion.
art0rz 2y ago
I've been running Arch with KDE under Wayland on two different laptops both with NVIDIA GPUs using proprietary drivers for years and have not run into issues. Maybe I'm lucky? It's been flawless for me.
- lyu07282 2y ago
  The experiences always vary quite a lot, it depends so much on what you do with it. For example discord doesn't support screen sharing with Wayland, it's just one small example but those can add up over time. Another example is display rotation which was broken in kde for a long time (recently fixed).
green-salt 2y ago
Whatever pop_os uses has been quite stable for my 4070.
- tormeh 2y ago
  Pop uses X by default because of Nvidia.
segmondy 2y ago
plug, install then play, I got 3 different Nvidia GPU sets and all running without any issue, nothing crazy to do but follow installation instructions.
- anonym29 2y ago
  To some of us, running any closed source software in userland qualifies as quite crazy indeed.
DaoVeles 2y ago
I have never had an issue with them. That said I typically go mid range on cards so they are usually hardened architecture due to a year or two of being in the high end.
mathfailure 2y ago
Depends on the version of drivers: 550 version results into black screen (you have to kill and restart X server) after waking up from sleep. 535 version doesn't have this bug. Don't know about 555. Also tearing is a bitch. Still. Even with ForceCompositionPipeline.
drdaeman 2y ago
3090 owner here. Wayland is even worse mess than it normally is. Used to flicker real bad before 555.58.02, less so with the latest driver - but still has some glitches with games. A bunch of older Electron apps still fail to render anything and require hardware acceleration disabled. I gave up trying to make it all work - can't get rid of all the flicker and drawing issues, plus Wayland seems to be a real pain in the ass with HiDPI displays. X11 sort of works, but I had to entirely disable DPMS or one of my monitors never comes back online after going to sleep. I thought it was my KVM messing up, but that happened even with a direct connection... no idea what's going on there. CUDA works fine, save for the regular version compatibility hiccups.
- senectus1 2y ago
  4070ti super here, X11 is fine, i have zero issues. Wayland is mostly fine, though i get some windowframe glitches when maxing them to the monitor and a another issue that i'm pretty sure is wayland but it has obnly happened a couple of times and it locks the whole device up. I cant prove it yet.
devwastaken 2y ago
KDE plasma 6 + Nvidia beta 555 works well. Have to make .desktop files to launch some applications explicitly Wayland.
adrian_b 2y ago
I am not using Wayland and I do not have any intention to use it, therefore I do not care for any problems caused by Wayland not supporting NVIDIA and demanding that NVIDIA must support Wayland. I am using only Linux or FreeBSD on all my laptop, desktop or server computers. On desktop and server computers I did not ever have the slightest difficulty with the NVIDIA proprietary drivers, either for OpenGL or for CUDA applications or for video decoding/encoding or for multiple monitor support, with high resolution and high color depth, on either Gentoo/Funtoo Linux or FreeBSD, during the last two decades. I also have AMD GPUs, which I use for compute applications (because they are older models, which still had FP64 support). For graphics applications they frequently had annoying bugs, unlike NVIDIA (however my AMD GPUs have been older models, preceding RDNA, which might be better supported by the open-source AMD drivers). The only computers on which I had problems with NVIDIA on Linux were those laptops that used the NVIDIA Optimus method of coexistence with the Intel integrated GPUs. Many years ago I have needed a couple of days to properly configure the drivers and additional software so that the NVIDIA GPU was selected when desired, instead of the Intel iGPU. I do not know if any laptops with NVIDIA Optimus still exist. The laptops that I bought later had video outputs directly from the NVIDIA GPU, so there was no difference between them and desktops and the NVIDIA drivers worked flawlessly. Both on Gentoo/Funtoo Linux and FreeBSD I never had to do anything else but to give the driver update command and everything worked fine. Moreover, NVIDIA has always provided a nice GUI application "NVIDIA X Server Settings", which provides a lot of useful information and which makes very easy any configuration tasks, like setting the desired positions of multiple monitors. A few years ago there was nothing equivalent for the AMD or Intel GPU drivers, but that might have changed meanwhile.
tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
My experience with an AMD iGPU on Linux was so bad that my next laptop will be Intel. Horrible instability to the point where I could reliably crash my machine by using Google Maps for a few minutes, on both Chrome and Firefox. It got fixed eventually - with the next Ubuntu release, so I had a computer where I was afraid to use anything with WebGL for half a year.
littlecranky67 2y ago
I got my nvidia 1060 back then during the crypto crysis when the price of AMD GPUs were inflated due to miners. Hesitant and scepital about Linux support, I upgraded the same machine with that GPU since 2016 von Ubuntu 14.04, to 18.04 and now 24.04 - without any nvidia driver issues anytime whatsoever. When I read about issues with nvidias drivers, it is mostly people with rare distro or rolling release ones, with changing kernel versions very frequently and failure to recompile with the binary drivers. For LTS distros you will likely have no issues.

brrrrrm 2y ago

Kernel is an overloaded term for GPUs. This is about the linux kernel

karamanolev 2y ago
"... Linux GPU Kernel Modules" is pretty unambiguous to me.
- brrrrrm 2y ago
  Yep the title was updated.
brrrrrm 2y ago
Guh, wish i could delete this now that the title was updated. the original title (shown on the linked page) wasn't super clear

berkeleyjunk 2y ago

As someone who is pretty skeptical and reads the fine print, I think this is a good move and I really do not see a downside (other than the fact that this probably strengthens the nVidia monoculture).

vlovich123 2y ago
AFAIK I believe all they did was move the closed source user space driver code to their opaque firmware blob leaving a thin shim in the kernel. In essence I don’t believe that much has really changed here.
- stkdump 2y ago
  But the firmware runs directly on the hardware, right? So they effectively rearchitected their system to move what used to be 'above' the kernel to 'below' the kernel, which seems like a huge effort.
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    It’s some effort but I bet they added a classical serial CPU to run the existing code. In fact, [1] suggests that’s exactly what they did. I suspect they had other reasons to add the GSP so the amortized cost of moving the driver code to firmware was actually not that large all things considered and in the long term reduces their costs (eg they reduce the burden further of supporting multiple OSes, they can improve performance further theoretically, etc etc) [1] https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/525.78.01/README/gsp.html https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/525.78.01/R...
    - p_l 2y ago
      That's exactly what happened - Turing microarchitecture brought in new[1] "GSP" which is capable enough to run the task. Similar architecture happens AFAIK on Apple M-series where the GPU runs its own instance of RTOS talking with "application OS" over RPC. [1] Turing GSP is not the first "classical serial CPU" in nvidia chips, it's just first that has enough juice to do the task. Unfortunately without recalling the name of the component it seems impossible to find it again thanks to search results being full of nvidia ARM and GSP pages...

bradyriddle 2y ago

I remember Nvidia getting hacked pretty bad a few years ago. IIRC, the hackers threatened to release everything they had unless they open sourced their drivers. Maybe they got what they wanted. [0] https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/nvidia-hackers-allegedly-attempting-to-blackmail-company-into-open-sourcing-gpu-drivers https://portswigger.net/daily-swig/nvidia-hackers-allegedly-...

nicce 2y ago
Kernel modules are not user-space drivers which are still proprietary.
- porphyra 2y ago
  Much of the black magic has been moved from the drivers to the firmware anyway.
- bradyriddle 2y ago
  Ooops. Missed that part. Re-reading that story is kind of wild. I don't know how valuable what they allegedly got would be (silicon, graphics and chipset files) but the hackers accused Nvidia of 'hacking back' and encrypting their data. Reminds me of a story I heard about Nvidia hiring a private military to guard their cards after entire shipments started getting 'lost' somewhere in asia.
  - spookie 2y ago
    Wait what? That PMC story got me. Where can I find more info on that lmao?
    - bradyriddle 2y ago
      I'd heard the story first hand from a guy in san jose. Never looked it up until now. This is the closest thing I could find to it. In which case it sounds like it's been debunked. [0] https://www.pcgamer.com/no-half-a-million-geforce-rtx-30-series-gpus-were-not-lost-in-shipment-and-now-found/ https://www.pcgamer.com/no-half-a-million-geforce-rtx-30-ser... [1] https://www.geeknetic.es/Noticia/20794/Encuentran-en-Corea-500000-GPUs-RTX-30-de-NVIDIA-que-habian-sido-perdidas.html https://www.geeknetic.es/Noticia/20794/Encuentran-en-Corea-5...

creata 2y ago

Huh. Sway and Wayland was such a nightmare on Nvidia that it convinced me to switch to AMD. I wonder if it's better now. (IIRC the main issue was https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1317 https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1317 , which is now complete.)

modzu 2y ago
why switch to amd and not just switch to X? :D
- account42 2y ago
  Why not both?
- whalesalad 2y ago
  once you go Wayland you usually don’t go back :)
  - Void_Kitty 2y ago
    I tried wayland (on amd) and found it annoying to work with compaired to x11 without any apparent benefits, wayland is definitely the future, but i don't think the future is now
  - kiney 2y ago
    I tested wayland for a while to see what the hype is about. No uoside lits of small workflows broken. Back to Xorg it was.
snailmailman 2y ago
Better as of extremely recently. Explicit sync fixes most of the issues with flickering that I’ve had on Wayland. I’ve been using the latest (beta?) driver for a while because of it. I’m using Hyprland though so explicit sync support isn’t entirely there for me yet. It’s actively being worked on. But in the last few months it’s gotten a lot better

Animats 2y ago

NVidia revenue is now 78% from "AI" devices.[1] NVidia's market cap is now US$2.92 trillion. (Yes, trillion.) Only Apple and Microsoft can beat that. Their ROI climbed from about 10% to 90% in the last two years. That growth has all been on the AI side. Open-sourcing graphics drivers may indicate that NVidia is moving away from GPUs for graphics. That's not where the money is now. [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/nvidia-revenue-by-product-line/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/nvidia-revenue-by-product-l... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVDA/nvidia/roi https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVDA/nvidia/roi

joe_the_user 2y ago
Well, Nvidia seems to be claiming in the article that this is everything, not just graphics drivers: "NVIDIA GPUs share a common driver architecture and capability set. The same driver for your desktop or laptop runs the world’s most advanced AI workloads in the cloud. It’s been incredibly important to us that we get it just right." And For cutting-edge platforms such as NVIDIA Grace Hopper or NVIDIA Blackwell, you must use the open-source GPU kernel modules. The proprietary drivers are unsupported on these platforms. (These are two most advanced NVIDIA architectures currently)
- Animats 2y ago
  That's interesting. I've been expecting the AI cards to diverge more from the graphics cards. AI doesn't need triangle fill, Z-buffering, HDMI out, etc. 16 bit 4x4 multiply/add units are probably enough. What's going on in that area?
  - p_l 2y ago
    TL;DR - there seems to be not that much improvement from dropping the "graphics-only" parts of the chip if you already have a GPU instead of breaking into AI market as your first product. 1. nVidia compute dominance is not due to hyperfocus on AI (that's Google's TPU for you, or things like intel's NPU in Meteor Lake), but because CUDA offers considerable general purpose compute. In fact, considerable revenue came and still comes from non-AI compute. This also means that if you figure out a novel mechanism for AI that isn't based around 4x4 matrix addition, or which mixes it with various other operations, you can do them inline. This also includes any pre and post processing you might want to do on the data. 2. The whole advantage they have in software ecosystem builds upon their PTX assembly. Having it compile to CPU and only implement the specific variant of one or two instructions that map to "tensor cores" would be pretty much nonsensical (especially given that AI is not the only market they target with tensor cores - DSP for example is another). Additionally, a huge part of why nvidia built such a strong ecosystem is that you could take cheapest G80-based card and just start learning CUDA. Only some highest-end features are limited to most expensive cards, like RDMA and NVMe integration. Compare this with AMD, where for many purposes only the most expensive compute-only cards are really supported. Or specialized AI only chips that are often programmable either in very low-level way or essentially as "set a graph of large-scale matrix operations that are limited subset of operations exposed by Torch/Tensorflow" (Google TPU, Intel Meteor Lake NPU, etc). 3. CUDA literally began with how evolution of shader model led to general purpose "shader processor" instead of specialized vector and pixel processors. The space taken by specialized hardware for graphics that isn't also usable for general purpose compute is pretty minimal, although some of it is omitted, AFAIK, in compute only cards. In fact, some of the "graphics only" things like Z-buffering are done by the same logic that is used for compute (with limited amount of operations done by fixed-function ROP block), and certain fixed-function graphical components like texture mapping units are also used for high-performance array access. 4. Simplified manufacturing and logistics - nVidia uses essentially the same chips in most compute and graphics cards, possibly with minor changes achieved by changing chicken bits to route pins to different functions (as you mentioned, you don't need DP-outs of RTX4090 on an L40 card, but you can probably reuse the SERDES units to run NVLink on the same pins).

floam 2y ago

NVIDIA Transitions Fully Towards Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules or NVIDIA Transitions Towards Fully Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules?

j4hdufd8 2y ago
haven't read it but probably the former
- throwadobe 2y ago
  "towards" basically negates the "fully" before it for all real intents and purposes
slashdave 2y ago
Not much point in a "partially" open-source kernel module.
- floam 2y ago
  But “fully towards” is pretty ambiguous, like an entire partial implementation. Anyhow I read the article, I think they’re saying fully as in exclusively, like there eventually will not be both a closed source and open source driver co-maintained. So “fully open source” does make more sense. The current driver situation IS partially open source, because their offerings currently include open and closed source drivers and in the future the closed source drivers may be deprecated?
  - einpoklum 2y ago
    See my answer. It's not going to be fully-open-source drivers, it's rather that all drivers will have open-source kernel modules.
    - slashdave 2y ago
      You can argue against proprietary firmware, but is this all that different from other types of devices?

pluto_modadic 2y ago

damn, only for new GPUs.

mynameisvlad 2y ago
For varying definitions of "new". It supports Turing and up, which was released in 2018 with the 20xx line. That's two generations back at this point.

sillywalk 2y ago

From the github repo[0]: Most of NVIDIA's kernel modules are split into two components: An "OS-agnostic" component: this is the component of each kernel module that is independent of operating system. A "kernel interface layer": this is the component of each kernel module that is specific to the Linux kernel version and configuration. When packaged in the NVIDIA .run installation package, the OS-agnostic component is provided as a binary: [0] https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules

p_l 2y ago
That was the "classic" drivers. The new open source ones effectively move majority of the OS-agnostic component to run as blob on-GPU.
- arghwhat 2y ago
  Not quite - it moves some logic to the GSP firmware, but the user-space driver is still a significant portion of code. The exciting bits there is the work on NVK.
  - p_l 2y ago
    Yes, I was not including userspace driver in this, as a bit "out of scope" for the conversation :D

benjiweber 2y ago

I wonder if we'll ever get hdcp on nvidia. As much as I enjoy 480p video from streaming services.

viraptor 2y ago
Which service goes that low? The ones I know limit you from using 4k, but anything up to 1080p works fine.
- 9991 2y ago
  Nonsense that a 1080p limit is acceptable for (and accepted by) paying customers.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    Depends. I disagree with HDCP in theory on ideological grounds. In practice, my main movie device is below 720p (projector), so it will take another decade before it affects me in any way.
ozgrakkurt 2y ago
Just download it to your pc. It is better user experience and costs less

smcleod 2y ago

So does this mean actually getting rid of the binary blobs of microcode that are in their current ‘open’ drivers?

p_l 2y ago
No, it means the blob from the "closed" drivers is moved to run on GSP.

coconut08 2y ago

does this mean you will be able to use NVK/Mesa and CUDA at the same time? The non mesa proprietary side of nvidia's linux drivers are such a mess and NVK is improving by the day, but I really need cuda.

john2x 2y ago

Maybe that’s one way to retain engineers who are effectively millionaires.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

magicloop 2y ago

Remember that time when Linus looked at the camera and gave Nvidia the finger. Has that time now passed? Is it time to reconcile? Or are there still some gotchas?

jaimex2 2y ago
These are kernel modules not the actual drivers. So the finger remains up.

jcalvinowens 2y ago

Throwing the tarball over the wall and saying "fetch!" is meaningless to me. Until they actually contribute a driver to the upstream kernel, I'll be buying AMD.

aseipp 2y ago
You can just use Nouveau and NVK for that if you just need workstation graphics (and the open-gpu-modules source code/separate GSP release has been a big uplift to Nouveau too, at least.)
- jcalvinowens 2y ago
  Nouveau is great, and I absolutely admire what the community around it has been able to achieve. But I can't imagine choosing that over AMD's first class upstream driver support today.
- neop1x 2y ago
  IIRC hardware video decoding of HEVC didn't work for me with nouveau

xyst 2y ago

Nvidia has finally realize they couldn’t write drivers for their own hardware, especially for Linux. Never thought I would see the day.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
Suddenly they went from powering gaming to being the winners of the AI revolution; AI is Serious Cloud Stuff, and Serious Cloud Stuff means Linux, so...

shmerl 2y ago

That's not upstream yet. But they supposedly showed some interesting in nova too.

asaiacai 2y ago

I really hope this makes it easier to install/upgrade NVIDIA drivers on Linux. It's a nightmare to figure out version mismatches between drivers, utils, container-runtime...

einpoklum 2y ago
From my limited experience with their open-sourcing of kernel modules so far: It doesn't make things easier; but - the silver lining is that, for the most part, it doesn't make installation and configuration harder! Which is no small thing actually.
riddley 2y ago
A nightmare how? When i used their cards, I'd just download the .run and run it. Done.
- jaimex2 2y ago
  After a reboot of coarse :) Everything breaks immediately otherwise.
- amelius 2y ago
  And when it doesn't work, what do you do then? Exactly, that's when the nightmare starts.

einpoklum 2y ago

The title of this statement is misleading: NVIDIA is not transitioning to open-source drivers for its GPUs; most or all user-space parts of the drivers (and most importantly for me, libcuda.so) are closed-source; and as I understand from others, most of the logic is now in a binary blob that gets sent to the GPU. Now, I'm sure this open-sourcing has its uses, but for people who want to do something like a different hardware backend for CUDA with the same API, or to clear up "corners" of the API semantics, or to write things in a different-language without going through the C API - this does not help us.

qalmakka 2y ago

Well, it is something, even if it's still only the kernel module, and it will be probably never upstreamed anyway.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

CivBase 2y ago

Too late for me. I tried switching to Linux years ago but failed because of the awful state of NVIDIA's drivers. Switched to AMD least year and it's been a breeze ever since. Gaming on Linux with an NVIDIA card (especially an old one) is awful. Of course Linux gamers aren't the demographic driving this recent change of heart so I expect it to stay awful for a while yet.

doctoboggan 2y ago

My guess is Meta and/or Amazon told Nvidia that they would contribute considerable resources to development as long as the results were open source. Both companies bottom lines would benefit from improved kernel modules, and like another commenter said elsewhere, Nvidia doesn't have much to lose.

Narhem 2y ago

I cant wait to use linux without having to spend multiple weekends trying to get the right drivers to work.

aussieguy1234 2y ago

I'll update as soon at its in NixOS unstable. Hopefully this will change the mind of the sway maintainers to start supporting Nvidia cards, I'm using i3 and X but would like to try out Wayland.

jdonaldson 2y ago

It’s kind of surprising that these haven’t just been reverse engineered yet by language models.

special-K 2y ago
That's simply not how LLMs work, and are actually awful at reverse engineering of any kind.
- jdonaldson 2y ago
  Are you saying that they cant explain the contents of machine code in human readable format? Are you saying that they can’t be used in a system that iteratively evaluates combinations of inputs and check their results?
  - tiberious726 2y ago
    Just that they're horrible at it

matheusmoreira 2y ago

Transition is not done until their drivers are upstreamed into the mainline kernel and ALL features work out of the box, especially power management and hybrid graphics.

CodesInChaos 2y ago
I thought power management was moved to the GPU firmware in the 20 series, which is why the new driver only supports those?

rldjbpin 2y ago

mind the wording they've used here - "fully towards open-source" and not "towards fully open-source". big difference. almost nobody is going to give you the sauce hidden behind blobs. but i hope the dumb issues of the past (imagine using it on laptops with switchable graphics) go away slowly with this and it is not only for pleasing the enterprise crowd.

n3storm 2y ago

I read "NVIDIA transitions fully Torvalds..."

nikolayasdf123 2y ago

hope linux gets first class open source gpu drivers.. and dare I hope that Go adds native support for GPUs too

gigatexal 2y ago

will this mean that we'll be able to remove the arbitrary distinctions between quadro and geforce cards maybe by hacking some configs or such in the drivers?

Varloom 2y ago

They know CUDA monopoly won't last forever.

aseipp 2y ago
CUDA lives in userspace; this kernel driver release does not contain any of that. It's still very useful to release an open source DKMS driver, but this doesn't change anything at all about the CUDA situation.

muhehe 2y ago

What is GPU kernel module? Is it something like a driver for GPU?

qalmakka 2y ago
Yes. In modern operating systems, GPU drivers usually consist in kernel component that is loaded inside of the kernel or in a privileged context, and a userspace component that talks with it and implements the GPU-specific part of the APIs that the windowing system and applications use. In the case of NVIDIA, they have decided to drop their proprietary kernel module in favour of an open one. Unfortunately, it's out of tree. In Linux and BSD, you usually get all of your drivers with the system; you don't have to install anything, it's all mostly plug and play. For instance, this has been the case for AMD and Intel GPUs, which have a 100% open source stack. NVIDIA is particularly annoying due to the need to install the drivers separately and the fact they've got different implementations of things compared to anyone else, so NVIDIA users are often left behind by FOSS projects due to GeForce cards being more annoying to work with.
- muhehe 2y ago
  Thanks. I'm not well versed in these things. It sounded like something you load into GPU (it reminded me old hp printer, which required firmware upload after start).

nicman23 2y ago

they are worthless. the main code is in the userspace

shanoaice 2y ago

There is little meaning for NVIDIA to open-source only the driver portion of their cards, since they heavily rely on proprietary firmware and userspace lib (most important!) to do the real job. Firmware is a relatively small issue - this is mostly same for AMD and Intel, since encapsulation reduces work done on driver side and open-sourcing firmware could allow people to do some really unanticipated modification which might heavily threaten even commercial card sale. Nonetheless at least for AMD they still keep a fair share of work done by driver compared to Nvidia. Userspace library is the worst problem, since they handle a lot of GPU control related functionality and graphics API, which is still kept closed-source. The best thing we can hope is improvement on NVK and RedHat's Nova Driver can put pressure on NVIDIA releasing their user space components.

gpderetta 2y ago
It is meaningful because, as you note, it enables a fully opensource userspace driver. Of course the firmware is still proprietary and it increasingly contains more and more logic.
- matheusmoreira 2y ago
  Doesn't seem like a bad tradeoff so long as the proprietary stuff is kept completely isolated with no access to any other parts of my system.
  - justinclift 2y ago
    Personally, I somewhat wonder about that. The firmware (proprietary) which runs on the gpu seems like it'll have access to do things over the gpu PCIe bus, including read system memory, and access other devices (including network gear). Reading memory of remote hosts (ie RDMA) is also a thing which Nvidia gpus can do.
    - foresto 2y ago
      Is that not solvable using an IOMMU (assuming hardware that has one)?

v3ss0n 2y ago

Thank You Nvidia hacker! You did it! The Lapasu$ team threaten a few years back that if nvidia is not going to release nvidia opensource they are gonna release their code. That lead nvidia to releasing first kernel opensource module in a few months later but it was quite incomplete. Now it seems they are opensourcing fully more.

sylware 2y ago

Hopefully, we get a plain and simple C99 user space vulkan implementation.

exabrial 2y ago

Are Nvidia grace CPUs even available? I thought it was interesting they mentioned that.

resource_waste 2y ago

This means Fedora can bundle it?

gorkish 2y ago

This is great. I've been having to build my own .debs of the OSS driver for some time because of the crapola NVIDIA puts in their proprietary driver that prevents it from working in a VM as a passthrough device. (just a regular whole-card passthru, not trying to use GRID/vGPU on a consumer card or anything) NVIDIA can no longer get away with that nonsense when they have to show their code.

K33P4D 2y ago

Does this mean we can aggressively volt mod, add/replace memory modules to our liking?

svlasov 2y ago

All `g_bindata_k*.c` files are essentially blobs with no source provided: https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/tree/main/src/nvidia/generated https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/tree/main/...