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NVIDIA Transitioning To Official, Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Driver

posted by hubie on Thursday May 12 2022, @10:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the better-very-late-than-never dept.

takyon writes:

NVIDIA Transitioning To Official, Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Driver

The day has finally come: NVIDIA is publishing their Linux GPU kernel modules as open-source! To much excitement and a sign of the times, the embargo has just expired on this super-exciting milestone that many of us have been hoping to see for many years. Over the past two decades NVIDIA has offered great Linux driver support with their proprietary driver stack, but with the success of AMD's open-source driver effort going on for more than a decade, many have been calling for NVIDIA to open up their drivers. Their user-space software is remaining closed-source but as of today they have formally opened up their Linux GPU kernel modules and will be maintaining it moving forward. Here's the scoop on this landmark open-source decision at NVIDIA.

Many have been wondering in recent years what sort of NVIDIA open-source play the company has been working on... Going back to the end of 2019 have been signals of some sort of open-source driver effort and various rumblings have continued since that point. Last month I also pointed out a new open-source kernel driver appearing as part of the NVIDIA Tegra sources. Well, now the embargo has just expired and the lid can be lifted - NVIDIA is providing a fully open-source kernel driver solution for their graphics offerings. This isn't limited to just Tegra or so but spans not only their desktop graphics but is already production-ready for data center GPU usage.

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  • (Score: 1) by higuita on Friday May 13 2022, @02:15PM (1 child)

    by higuita (2465) on Friday May 13 2022, @02:15PM (#1244730)

    yes, in AMD, almost everything is fully open source

    you have kernel, user space totally open source (opengl, opencl and vulkan, while opengl and vulkan are using the latest standards and good performance, opencl is not yet there, something work, others do not)
    so you if you have a modern linux distro, you plug your amd card and boot and everything should work fine without any change or action from the user.

    you DO NOT NEED the close source AMD driver, unless you have a just released hardware, or need certified opengl drivers (medical and some CAD usage) or full openCL support or some new feature that opensource drivers (mesa) do not have yet... so even by AMD recommendation, you should use open source drivers and from the previous list, only certification and some parts of opencl (that few people use, so the development is slower) isn't usually solved a few months later if you can wait

    The AMD GPU firmware is not opensource, but almost no hardware firmware is open source... bit AMD firmware (and almost all other firmware) are between 2k and 250k, not almost 40MB as this nvidia "firmware"

    Just to compare, some wifi and gpu firmware on my current computer:

    $ ls -lh /lib/firmware/brcm/brcmfmac4366c-pcie.bin /lib/firmware/nvidia/470.103.01/gsp.bin /lib/firmware/rtw89/rtw8852a_fw.bin /lib/firmware/i915/icl_guc_33.0.0.bin /lib/firmware/radeon/kaveri_uvd.bin

    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1,1M mar 10 07:05 /lib/firmware/brcm/brcmfmac4366c-pcie.bin
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 377K mar 10 07:05 /lib/firmware/i915/icl_guc_33.0.0.bin
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 35M jan 6 12:15 /lib/firmware/nvidia/470.103.01/gsp.bin
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 228K mar 10 07:05 /lib/firmware/radeon/kaveri_uvd.bin
    -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1,4M mar 10 07:05 /lib/firmware/rtw89/rtw8852a_fw.bin

    $ find /lib/firmware/ -size +5M -ls
      -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 5652688 mar 10 07:05 /lib/firmware/qcom/sdm845/modem.mbn
      -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10420560 mar 10 07:05 /lib/firmware/qcom/sdm845/adsp.mbn
      -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 20434408 mar 10 07:05 /lib/firmware/liquidio/lio_23xx_vsw.bin
      -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6683216 mar 10 07:05 /lib/firmware/netronome/flower/nic_AMDA0058.nffw
      -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 36011968 jan 6 12:15 /lib/firmware/nvidia/470.103.01/gsp.bin

    So yes, nvidia firmware is by far the largest one

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 13 2022, @03:57PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 13 2022, @03:57PM (#1244771)

    For the most part you don't need the proprietary driver even for new hardware. Usually the kernel support is released at the same time as the hardware, or even a little earlier.