41–50 of 259 posts
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.
damn, only for new GPUs.
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…
The new open source ones effectively move majority of the OS-agnostic component to run as blob on-GPU.
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.
What really changed the situation is that Turing architecture GPUs bring new, more powerful management CPU, which has enough capacity to essentially run the OS-agnostic parts of driver that used to be provided as blob on linux.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why? It should make it much easier to support Nvidia GPUs on Windows, Linux, Arm/x86/RISC-V and more OSes with a single firmware codebase per GPU now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I have a 3070 on X and it has been great.
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 , which is now complete.)
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
Yup. Anecdotally, I see a lot of folks trying to run wine/games on Wayland reporting flickering issues that are gone as of version 555, which is the most recent release save for 560 coming out this week. It's a good time to be on the bleeding edge.