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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

#191

Post by doix »

asyx wrote: post #57
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.

I think it's X11 stuff that is using Vulkan for rendering that is still flickering in 555. This probably affects pretty much all of Proton / Wine gaming.

Any specific examples that you know should be broken? I am on X11 with 555 drivers and an nvidia gpu. I don't have any flickering when I'm gaming, it's actually why I stay on X11 instead of transitioning to wayland.

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

#192

Post by jdonaldson »

special-K wrote: post #144
jdonaldson wrote: post #143

It’s kind of surprising that these haven’t just been reverse engineered yet by language models.

That's simply not how LLMs work, and are actually awful at reverse engineering of any kind.

Are you saying that they cant explain the contents of machine code in human readable format? Are you saying that they can’t be used in a system that iteratively evaluates combinations of inputs and check their results?

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

#193

Post by pabs3 »

gpderetta wrote: post #185
shanoaice wrote: post #171

There is little meaning for NVIDIA to open-source only the driver portion of their cards, since they heavily rely on proprietary firmware and userspace lib (most important!) to do the real job. Firmware is a relatively small issue - this is mostly same for AMD and Intel, since encapsulation reduces work done on driver side and open-sourcing firmware could allow people to do some really unanticipated modification whic…

It is meaningful because, as you note, it enables a fully opensource userspace driver. Of course the firmware is still proprietary and it increasingly contains more and more logic.

The firmware is also signed, so you can't even do reverse engineering to replace it.

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

#194

Post by stragies »

adrian_b wrote: post #190
stragies wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything you wrote assumes the IOMMUs across the board to be 100% correctly implemented without errors/bugdoors. People used to believe similar things about Hyperthreading, glitchability, ME, Cisco, boot-loaders, ... the list goes on.

There still is a huge difference between running privileged code on the CPU, for which there is nothing limiting what it can do, and code that runs on a device, which should normally be contained by the I/O MMU, except if the I/O MMU is buggy. The functions of an I/O MMU for checking and filtering the transfers are very simple, so the probability of non-intentional bugs is extremely small in comparison with the other…

Agreed, that the feature-set of IOMMU is fairly small, but is this function not usually included in one of the Chipset ICs, which do run a lot other code/functions alongside a (hopefully) faithful correct IOMMU routine?

Which -to my eyes- would increase the possibility of other system parts mucking with IOMMU restrictions, and/or triggering bugs.

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

#195

Post by matheusmoreira »

shanoaice wrote: post #171

There is little meaning for NVIDIA to open-source only the driver portion of their cards, since they heavily rely on proprietary firmware and userspace lib (most important!) to do the real job. Firmware is a relatively small issue - this is mostly same for AMD and Intel, since encapsulation reduces work done on driver side and open-sourcing firmware could allow people to do some really unanticipated modification whic…

Why is the user space component required? Won't they provide sysfs interfaces to control the hardware?

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

#196

Post by AshamedCaptain »

shanoaice wrote: post #171

There is little meaning for NVIDIA to open-source only the driver portion of their cards, since they heavily rely on proprietary firmware and userspace lib (most important!) to do the real job. Firmware is a relatively small issue - this is mostly same for AMD and Intel, since encapsulation reduces work done on driver side and open-sourcing firmware could allow people to do some really unanticipated modification whic…

I really don't know where this crap about "Moving everything to the firmware" is coming from. The kernel part of the nvidia driver has always been small, and this is the only thing they are open-sourcing (they have been announcing it for months now......). The immense majority of the user-space driver is still closed and no one has seen any indications that this may change.

I see no indications either that either nvidia nor any of the rest of the manufacturers has moved any respectable amount of functionality to the firmware. If you look at the opensource drivers you can even confirm by yourself that the firmware does practically nothing -- the size of the binary blobs of AMD cards are minuscule for example, and long are the times of ATOMBIOS. The drivers are literally generating bytecode-level binaries for the shader units in the GPU, what do you expect the firmware could even do at this point? Re-optimize the compiler output?

There was an example of a GPU that did move everything to the firmware -- the videocore on the raspberry pi, and it was clearly a completely distinct paradigm, as the "driver" would almost literally pass through OpenGL calls to a mailbox, read by the secondary ARM core (more powerful than the main ARM core!) that was basically running the actual driver as "firmware". Nothing I see on nvidia indicates a similar trend, otherwise RE-ing it would be trivial, as happened with the VC.

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

#197

Post by matheusmoreira »

gpderetta wrote: post #185
shanoaice wrote: post #171

There is little meaning for NVIDIA to open-source only the driver portion of their cards, since they heavily rely on proprietary firmware and userspace lib (most important!) to do the real job. Firmware is a relatively small issue - this is mostly same for AMD and Intel, since encapsulation reduces work done on driver side and open-sourcing firmware could allow people to do some really unanticipated modification whic…

It is meaningful because, as you note, it enables a fully opensource userspace driver. Of course the firmware is still proprietary and it increasingly contains more and more logic.

Doesn't seem like a bad tradeoff so long as the proprietary stuff is kept completely isolated with no access to any other parts of my system.

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

#198

Post by cesarb »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #195
shanoaice wrote: post #171

There is little meaning for NVIDIA to open-source only the driver portion of their cards, since they heavily rely on proprietary firmware and userspace lib (most important!) to do the real job. Firmware is a relatively small issue - this is mostly same for AMD and Intel, since encapsulation reduces work done on driver side and open-sourcing firmware could allow people to do some really unanticipated modification whic…

Why is the user space component required? Won't they provide sysfs interfaces to control the hardware?

It's something common to all modern GPUs, not just NVIDIA: most of the logic is in a user space library loaded by the OpenGL or Vulkan loader into each program. That library writes a stream of commands into a buffer (plus all the necessary data) directly into memory accessible to the GPU, and there's a single system call at the end to ask the operating system kernel to tell the GPU to start reading from that command buffer. That is, other than memory allocation and a few other privileged operations, the user space programs talk directly to the GPU.

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

#199

Post by ploxiln »

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #196
shanoaice wrote: post #171

There is little meaning for NVIDIA to open-source only the driver portion of their cards, since they heavily rely on proprietary firmware and userspace lib (most important!) to do the real job. Firmware is a relatively small issue - this is mostly same for AMD and Intel, since encapsulation reduces work done on driver side and open-sourcing firmware could allow people to do some really unanticipated modification whic…

I really don't know where this crap about "Moving everything to the firmware" is coming from. The kernel part of the nvidia driver has always been small, and this is the only thing they are open-sourcing (they have been announcing it for months now......). The immense majority of the user-space driver is still closed and no one has seen any indications that this may change. I see no indications either that either nvi…

https://lwn.net/Articles/953144/

> Recently, though, the company has rearchitected its products, adding a large RISC-V processor (the GPU system processor, or GSP) and moving much of the functionality once handled by drivers into the GSP firmware. The company allows that firmware to be used by Linux and shipped by distributors. This arrangement brings a number of advantages; for example, it is now possible for the kernel to do reclocking of NVIDIA GPUs, running them at full speed just like the proprietary drivers can. It is, he said, a big improvement over the Nouveau-only firmware that was provided previously.

> There are a number of disadvantages too, though. The firmware provides no stable ABI, and a lot of the calls it provides are not documented. The firmware files themselves are large, in the range of 20-30MB, and two of them are required for any given device. That significantly bloats a system's /boot directory and initramfs image (which must provide every version of the firmware that the kernel might need), and forces the Nouveau developers to be strict and careful about picking up firmware updates.

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

#200

Post by jcalvinowens »

aseipp wrote: post #173
jcalvinowens wrote: post #79

Throwing the tarball over the wall and saying "fetch!" is meaningless to me. Until they actually contribute a driver to the upstream kernel, I'll be buying AMD.

You can just use Nouveau and NVK for that if you just need workstation graphics (and the open-gpu-modules source code/separate GSP release has been a big uplift to Nouveau too, at least.)

Nouveau is great, and I absolutely admire what the community around it has been able to achieve. But I can't imagine choosing that over AMD's first class upstream driver support today.
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