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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

#141

Post by jmorenoamor »

chillfox wrote: post #111
dralley wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I also see this as the main reason. GPU drivers for Linux, as far as I know, were just a niche use case, maybe CUDA planted a small seed, and the AI hype is the flower. Now the industry, not the users, demand drivers, so this became a demanded feature instead of a niche user wish.

A bit sad, but hey, welcome anyways.

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

#142

Post by Fr0styMatt88 »

JasonSage wrote: post #116
Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 some…

Yeah it’s pretty awesome overall. I think the issues are from a few things on my end:

- I’ve upgraded through a few iterations starting with Plasma 6, so my dotfiles might be a bit wonky. I’m not using Home Manager so my dotfiles are stateful.

- Could be very particular to my dock setup as I have two docks + one of the clock widgets.

- Could be the particular wallpaper I’m using (it’s one of the dynamic ones that comes with KDE).

- It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s related to audio somehow as I have Bluetooth set-up for when I need it.

I’m sure it’ll settle soon enough :)

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

#145

Post by rfoo »

1oooqooq wrote: post #131
justinclift wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Nvidia, the most likely reason they've strongly avoided Open Sourcing their drivers isn't anything like that. It's simply a function of their history. They used to have high priced professional level graphics cards ("Nvidia Quadro") using exactly the same chips as their consumer graphics cards. The BIOS of the cards was different, enabling different features. So people wanting those features cheaply would buy the…

interesting timing to recall that story. now the same trick is used for h100 vs whatever the throttled-for-embargo-wink-wink Chinese version is called. but those companies are really adverse to open sourcing because they can't be sure they own all the code. it's decades of copy pasting reference implementations after all

> now the same trick is used for h100 vs whatever the throttled-for-embargo-wink-wink Chinese version

No. H20 is a different chip designed to be less compute-dense (by having different combinations of SM/L2$/HBM controller). It is not a throttled chip.

A800 and H800 are A100/H100 with some area of the chip physically blown up and reconfigured. They are also not simply throttled.

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

#146

Post by sam_bristow »

josefx wrote: post #140
nailer wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having products that require a bunch of extra work due to proprietary drivers, especially when their competitors don't require that work, is not good.

The biggest chunk of that "extra work" would be installing Linux in the first place, given that almost everything comes with Windows out of the box. An additional "sudo apt install nvidia-drivers" isn't going to stop anyone who already got that far.

Does the "everything comes with Windows out of the box" still apply for the servers and workstations where I imagine the vast majority of these high-end GPUs are going these days?

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

#147

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

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.

My experience with an AMD iGPU on Linux was so bad that my next laptop will be Intel. Horrible instability to the point where I could reliably crash my machine by using Google Maps for a few minutes, on both Chrome and Firefox. It got fixed eventually - with the next Ubuntu release, so I had a computer where I was afraid to use anything with WebGL for half a year.

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

#148

Post by bornfreddy »

hulitu wrote: post #56
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.

You can always use X11. /s

I know that was a joke, but - as someone who is still on X, what am I missing? Any practical advantages to using Wayland when using a single monitor on desktop computer?

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

#150

Post by Keyframe »

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.

Me too. Now I have a laptop with discrete nvidia and an eGPU with 3090 in it, a desktop with 4090, another laptop with another discrete nvidia.. all switching combinations work, acceleration works, game performance is on par with windows (even with proton to within a small percentage or even sometimes better). All out of the box with stock Ubuntu and installing driver from Nvidia site.

The only "trick" is I'm still on X11 and probably will stay. Note that I did try wayland on few occasions but I steered away (mostly due to other issues with it at the time).

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