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NVIDIA Transitions Fully Towards Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Modules

developer.nvidia.com

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Re: NVIDIA Transitions Fully Towards Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Modules

#21

Post by dralley »

bradyriddle wrote: post #5

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-...

I doubt it. It's probably a matter of constantly being prodded by their industry partners (i.e. Red Hat), constantly being shamed by the community, and reducing the amount of maintenance they need to do to keep their driver stack updated and working on new kernels.

The meat of the drivers is still proprietary, this just allows them to be loaded without a proprietary kernel module.

Re: NVIDIA Transitions Fully Towards Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Modules

#22

Post by art0rz »

hypeatei wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: NVIDIA Transitions Fully Towards Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Modules

#23

Post by porphyra »

nicce wrote: post #17
bradyriddle wrote: post #5

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-...

Kernel modules are not user-space drivers which are still proprietary.

Much of the black magic has been moved from the drivers to the firmware anyway.

Re: NVIDIA Transitions Fully Towards Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Modules

#24

Post by sqeaky »

anon291 wrote: post #20
hypeatei wrote: post #2

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.

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.

> 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.

Re: NVIDIA Transitions Fully Towards Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Modules

#25

Post by joe_the_user »

Animats wrote: post #18

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…

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)

Re: NVIDIA Transitions Fully Towards Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Modules

#27

Post by green-salt »

hypeatei wrote: post #2

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.

Whatever pop_os uses has been quite stable for my 4070.

Re: NVIDIA Transitions Fully Towards Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Modules

#28

Post by vlovich123 »

stkdump wrote: post #19
vlovich123 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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/R...

Re: NVIDIA Transitions Fully Towards Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Modules

#29

Post by orbital-decay »

Animats wrote: post #18

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…

It indicates nothing; they started it a few years ago, before that. They just transferred the most important parts of their driver to the (closed source) firmware, to be handled by the onboard ARM CPU, and open sourced the rest.
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