Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

NVIDIA Transitions Fully Towards Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Modules

developer.nvidia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 259 posts

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

#111

Post by chillfox »

dralley wrote: post #21
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.

Nvidia has historically given zero fucks about the opinions of their partners.

So my guess is it's to do with LLMs. They are all in on AI, and having more of their code be part of training sets could make tools like ChatGPT/Claude/Copilot better at generating code for Nvidia GPUs.

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

#112

Post by gessha »

commodoreboxer wrote: post #68
kabes wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to believe one of the highest valued companies in the world cares about being shamed for not having open source drivers.

They care when it affects their bottom line, and customers leaving for the competition does that. I don't know if that's what's happening here, honestly, but you're right that they don't care about being shamed, but building a reputation of being hard to work with and target, especially in a growing market like Linux (still tiny, but growing nonetheless, and becoming significantly more important in the areas where no…

> customers leaving for the competition does that

What competition?

I do agree that companies don’t really care for public sentiment as long as business is going as usual. Nvidia is printing money with their data center hardware [1] where half of their yearly revenue comes from.

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financia...

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

#113

Post by spookie »

bradyriddle wrote: post #94
nicce wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Wait what? That PMC story got me. Where can I find more info on that lmao?

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

#114

Post by riddley »

asaiacai wrote: post #83

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...

A nightmare how? When i used their cards, I'd just download the .run and run it. Done.

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

#115

Post by Fr0styMatt88 »

JasonSage wrote: post #50
snailmailman wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Better as of extremely recently. 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.

On latest NixOS unstable and KDE + Wayland is still a bit of a dumpster fire for me (3070 + latest NV drivers). In particular there’s a buffer wait bug in EGL that needs fixing on the Nvidia side that causes the Plasma UI to become unresponsive. Panels are also broken for me, with icons not showing.

Having said that, the latest is a pain on X11 right now as well, with frequent crashing of Plasma, which atleast restarts itself.

There’s a lot of bleeding on the bleeding edge right at this moment :)

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

#116

Post by JasonSage »

Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #115
JasonSage wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Better as of extremely recently. 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.

On latest NixOS unstable and KDE + Wayland is still a bit of a dumpster fire for me (3070 + latest NV drivers). In particular there’s a buffer wait bug in EGL that needs fixing on the Nvidia side that causes the Plasma UI to become unresponsive. Panels are also broken for me, with icons not showing. Having said that, the latest is a pain on X11 right now as well, with frequent crashing of Plasma, which atleast restar…

That's interesting, maybe it's hardware-dependent? I'm doing nixos + KDE + Wayland and I've had almost no issues in day-to-day usage and productivity.

I agree with you that there's a lot of bleeding. Linux is nicer than it used to be and there's less fiddling required to get to a usable base, but still plenty of fiddling as you get into more niche usage, especially when it involves any GPU hardware/software. Yet somehow one can run Elden Ring on Steam via Proton with a few mouse clicks and no issues, which would've been inconceivable to me only a few years ago.

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

#117

Post by atrus »

JasonSage wrote: post #105
mananaysiempre wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nixos-unstable doesn't have 555 Version 555.58.02 is under “latest” in nixos-unstable as of about three weeks ago[1]. (Somebody should check with qyliss if she knows the PR tracker is dead... But the last nixos-unstable bump was two days ago, so it’s there.) [1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/4e15c4a8ad30c02d6c26...

`nvidia-smi` shows that my driver version is 550.78. I ran `nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade` yesterday. My nixos channel is `nixos-unstable`. Do you know something I don't? I'd love to be on the latest version. I should have written my post better, it implies that 555 does not exist in nixpkgs, which I never meant. There's certainly a phrasing that captures what I'm seeing more accurately.

Are you using flakes? If you don't do `nix flake update` there won't be all that much to update.

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

#118

Post by Dylan16807 »

chasil wrote: post #53
Workaccount2 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

An opinion on support from over ten years ago is not a very strong suggestion.

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

#119

Post by misterbishop »

robviren wrote: post #38
misterbishop wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Had similar experience with my Legion 5i 3070 with Wayland and Nvidia 555, but my HDMI out is all screwed up now of course. Working on 550. One step forward and one step back.

is there a mux switch?
Post reply on HN