NVIDIA Transitions Fully Towards Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Modules • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by justinclift » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 2:07 AM UTC

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-...

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 consumer graphics cards and flash the matching Quadro BIOS to them. Worked perfectly fine.

Nvidia naturally wasn't happy about those "lost sales", so began a game of whack-a-mole to stop BIOS flashing from working. They did stuff like adding resistors to the boards to tell the card whether it was a Geforce or Quadro card, and when that was promptly reverse engineered they started getting creative in other ways.

Meanwhile, they couldn't really Open Source their drivers because then people could see what the "Geforce vs Quadro" software checks were. That would open up software countermeasures being developed.

---

In the most recent few years the professional cards and gaming cards now use different chips. So the BIOS tricks are no longer relevant.

Which means Nvidia can "safely" Open Source their drivers now, and they've begun doing so.

--

Note that this is a copy of my comment from several months ago, as it's just as relevant now as it was then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38418278

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

#122

Post by jaimex2 » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 2:18 AM UTC

magicloop wrote: post #78

Remember that time when Linus looked at the camera and gave Nvidia the finger. Has that time now passed? Is it time to reconcile? Or are there still some gotchas?

These are kernel modules not the actual drivers. So the finger remains up.

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

#123

Post by jaimex2 » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 2:19 AM UTC

riddley wrote: post #114

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.

After a reboot of coarse :)

Everything breaks immediately otherwise.

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

#124

Post by zxexz » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 2:39 AM UTC

JasonSage wrote: post #76

bcrescimanno wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 555 version is the current version. It was officially released on June 27. https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-555.58-Linux-Driver

In defense of the parent, upcoming can still be a relative term, albeit a bit misleading. For example: I'm running the 550 drivers still because my upstream nixos-unstable doesn't have 555 for me yet.

I love NixOS, and the nvidia-x11 package is truly wonderful and captures so many options. But having such a complex package makes updating and regression testing take time. For ML stuff I ended up using it as the basis for an overlay, and ripping out literally everything I don’t need, which makes it a matter of minutes usually to make the changes requires to upgrade when a new driver is released I’m running completely headless because these are H100 nodes, and I just need persistenced and fabricmanager, and GDRMA (which wasn’t working at all, causing me to go down this rabbit hole of stripping everything away until I could figure out why).

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

#125

Post by XorNot » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 2:40 AM UTC

creata wrote: post #8

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.)

Easy Linux use is what keeps me firmly on AMD. This move may earn them a customer.

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

#126

Post by anonym29 » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 2:47 AM UTC

segmondy wrote: post #41

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.

plug, install then play, I got 3 different Nvidia GPU sets and all running without any issue, nothing crazy to do but follow installation instructions.

To some of us, running any closed source software in userland qualifies as quite crazy indeed.

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

#127

Post by CivBase » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 2:51 AM UTC

Too late for me. I tried switching to Linux years ago but failed because of the awful state of NVIDIA's drivers. Switched to AMD least year and it's been a breeze ever since.

Gaming on Linux with an NVIDIA card (especially an old one) is awful. Of course Linux gamers aren't the demographic driving this recent change of heart so I expect it to stay awful for a while yet.

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

#128

Post by JasonSage » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 2:52 AM UTC

atrus wrote: post #117

JasonSage wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

`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.

I am! I forgot about this. Mental model check happening.

(Still on 550.)

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

#129

Post by devwastaken » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 3:06 AM UTC

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.

KDE plasma 6 + Nvidia beta 555 works well. Have to make .desktop files to launch some applications explicitly Wayland.

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

#130

Post by doctoboggan » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 3:06 AM UTC

My guess is Meta and/or Amazon told Nvidia that they would contribute considerable resources to development as long as the results were open source. Both companies bottom lines would benefit from improved kernel modules, and like another commenter said elsewhere, Nvidia doesn't have much to lose.