https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/
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I just came to this place to report and ask about this. Am I reading it right that these are the “previously” proprietary drivers from Nvidia, now open sourced (and maintained)? Does that mean the drivers will be part of Linux soon?
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I was in a discussion with someone just yesterday re the problems of wayland to work with Nvidia. Then claimed that it was Nvidia problem. My point was that with Nvidia’s market share reported to be 80% +/-, if your software doesn’t work with the market leader, I’m pretty sure it’s not Nvidia’s fault.
Their response was that it’s Nvidia’s reluctance to be open source.
Looks like we will soon know. This could be a big boost for Wayland.
From the Phoronix article :
Only Turing and newer GPUs will be supported by this open-source kernel driver.
Here I am with a Maxwell card. . . GTX970
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That sucks. My current Nvidia card is a GTX 1070.
I wonder why it is limited to the newer cards only.
Didn’t AMD do the same thing originally?
Might be different now.
So I remember hearing frustrations from members of the Linux community that Nvidia was always doing its own thing and not working in cooperation with anybody. Guess that is changing,
“we have been working closely with NVidia for a couple of years now trying to help prepare the ground for NVidia moving to a model with an open source kernel driver. An effort that has now borne fruits in terms of todays announcement from NVidia about releasing an out of tree kernel driver for their GPU. People like Kevin Martin, the manager for our GPU technologies team, Ben Skeggs the maintainer of Nouveau and Dave Airlie, the upstream kernel maintainer for the graphics subsystem, Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst and our accelerator lead Tom Rix have all taken part in meetings, code reviews and discussions on how to make this happen with NVidia over the last Month.”
“So the plan we are working towards from our side, but which is likely to take a few years to come to full fruition, is to come up with a way for the NVidia binary driver and Mesa to share a kernel driver. The details of how we will do that is something we are still working on and discussing with our friends at NVidia, but it is likely to be a brand new driver designed to address both the needs of the NVidia userspace and the needs of the Mesa userspace. Along with that evolution we hope to work with NVidia engineers to refactor the userspace bits of Mesa that are now targeting just Nouveau to be able to interact with this new kernel driver and also work so that the binary driver and Nouveau can share the same firmware. This has clear advantages for both the open source community and the binary driver. For the open source community it means that we will now have a kernel driver and firmware that allows things changing the clocking of the GPU to provide the kind of performance people expect from the NVidia graphics card and it means that we will have an open source driver that will have access to the firmware and kernel updates from day one for new generations of NVidia hardware.”
“Long term we will hope be able to get a similar experience with NVidia hardware that that we today can offer for Intel and AMD hardware, in terms out of box functionality. Which means day 1 support for new chipsets, a high performance open source Mesa driver for NVidia and it will allow us to sign the Nvidia driver alongside the rest of the kernel to enable things like secureboot support. Since this first release is targeting compute one can expect that these options will first be available for compute users and then graphics at a later time.”