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

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

#221

Post by cpgxiii » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 6:33 PM UTC

ploxiln wrote: post #199

AshamedCaptain wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ke…

These aren't necessarily conflicting assessments. The addition of the GSP to Turing and later GPUs does mean that some behavior can be moved on-device from the drivers. Device initialization and management is an important piece of behavior, certainly, but in the context of the all work done by the Nvidia driver (both kernel and user-space), it is a relatively tiny portion (e.g. compiling/optimizing shaders and kernels, video encode/decode, etc).

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

#222

Post by 1oooqooq » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 7:01 PM UTC

rfoo wrote: post #145

1oooqooq wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

that's what nvidia told everyone in mar 23... but there's a reason why h800 were included last minute on the embargo in oct 23.

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

#223

Post by lyu07282 » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 7:03 PM UTC

sqeaky wrote: post #73

lyu07282 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a lot has probably to do with not really understanding their distributions package manager and lkms specifically, I also always suspected that most Linux users don't know if they are using Wayland or X11 and the issues they had were actually Wayland specific ones they wouldn't have with Nvidia/x11 and come to think of it, how would they even know if it's a GPU driver issue in the first place? Guess I'm the mechanic i…

When I run Gentoo or Arch, I know. But when I run Ubuntu or Fedora, should I have needed to know? On plenty of distros "I want to install it and forget about is reasonable" and on both Gentoo and Ubuntu I have rebooted from a working system into a system where the display stopped working, at least on Gentoo I was ready because I broke it somehow.

Absolutely I once had an issue with kernel/user-space driver version mismatch in Ubuntu, trivial to fix and the kernel logs tell you what's wrong. But yeah I get that most users don't read their kernel logs and it shouldn't be an expectation to do so for normal users of linux. The experiences are just very different, it's why the car mechanic analogy fits so well.

I think it also got so much better over time, I've been using Linux since debian woody (22 years ago) the stuff you had to deal with back then heavily skews my perspective on what users today see as unacceptable brokenness in the Nvidia driver.

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

#224

Post by CamperBob2 » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 7:04 PM UTC

justinclift wrote: post #121

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…

The explanation could also be as simple as fear of patent trolls.

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

#225

Post by anon291 » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 7:04 PM UTC

isatty wrote: post #160

anon291 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Likewise. Rock solid for decades in intel + nvidia proprietary drivers even when doing things like hot plugging for passthroughs.

Yeah I once worked at a cloud gaming company that used Wine on Linux on NVIDIA to stream cloud games. They were the only real option for multi-game performance, and very rock solid in terms of uptime. I truly have no idea what people are talking about. Yes I use X11.

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

#226

Post by anon291 » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 7:06 PM UTC

sqeaky wrote: post #73

lyu07282 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a lot has probably to do with not really understanding their distributions package manager and lkms specifically, I also always suspected that most Linux users don't know if they are using Wayland or X11 and the issues they had were actually Wayland specific ones they wouldn't have with Nvidia/x11 and come to think of it, how would they even know if it's a GPU driver issue in the first place? Guess I'm the mechanic i…

When I run Gentoo or Arch, I know. But when I run Ubuntu or Fedora, should I have needed to know? On plenty of distros "I want to install it and forget about is reasonable" and on both Gentoo and Ubuntu I have rebooted from a working system into a system where the display stopped working, at least on Gentoo I was ready because I broke it somehow.

I've run NixOS for almost a decade now and I honestly would not recommend anything else. I've had many issues with booting on almost every distro. They're about as reliable as Windows in that regard. NixOS has been absolutely rock solid; beyond anything I could possibly have hoped for. In the extremely rare case my system would not boot, I've either found a hardware problem that would affect anyone, or I could just revert to a previous system revision and boot up. Never had any problem. No longer use anything else because it's just too risky

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

#227

Post by rfoo » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 7:09 PM UTC

1oooqooq wrote: post #222

rfoo wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

that's what nvidia told everyone in mar 23... but there's a reason why h800 were included last minute on the embargo in oct 23.

That's not what NVIDIA claimed, that's what I have personally verified.

> there's a reason why h800 were included last minute

No. Oct 22 restrictions are by itself significantly easier than Oct 23 one. NVIDIA just need to kill 4 NVLink lanes off A100 and you get A800. For H100 you kill some more NVLink until on paper NVLink bandwidth is roughly at A800 level again and then voila.

BIS is certainly pissed off by NVIDIA's attempt at being creative to sell the best possible product to China. So they actually lowered allowed compute number AGAIN in Oct 23. That's what killed H800.

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

#228

Post by lyu07282 » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 7:21 PM UTC

chasil wrote: post #216

Dylan16807 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Your problem there is that both search engines place this image and backstory at the top of the results, so neither Google nor Bing agree with any of you. If you think they're wrong, be sure to let them know.

What torvalds is complaining about is absolutely true, but the problem is that most users do not give a shit about those issues. Torvalds disagreement wasn't about bugs in-, or complains about the quality of the proprietary driver, he complained about nvidias lack of open source contributions and bad behavior towards the kernel developer community. But users don't care if they run a proprietary driver as long as it works (and it does work fine for most people).

So you see now why that's not very relevant to end-users experiences they were talking about?

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

#229

Post by Dylan16807 » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 7:50 PM UTC

chasil wrote: post #216

Dylan16807 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Your problem there is that both search engines place this image and backstory at the top of the results, so neither Google nor Bing agree with any of you. If you think they're wrong, be sure to let them know.

Do you think Google and Bing are endorsing top results, and in particular endorsing a result like that in the specific context of what manufacturers I consider buying from?

That's the only way they would be disagreeing with me.

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

#230

Post by wtallis » Thu, Jul 18, 2024, 8:24 PM UTC

brendank310 wrote: post #187

matheusmoreira wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you better actually use IOMMU Is this feature commonly present on PC hardware? I've only ever read about it in the context of smartphone security. I've also read that nvidia doesn't like this sort of thing because it allows virtualizing their cards which is supposed to be an "enterprise" feature.

Relatively common nowadays. It used to be delineated as a feature in Intel chips as part of their vPro line, but I think it’s baked in. Generally an IOMMU is needed for performant PCI passthrough to VMs, and Windows uses it for DeviceGuard which tries to prevent DMA attacks.

Mainstream consumer x86 processors have had IOMMU capability for over a decade, but for the first few years it was commonly disabled on certain parts for product segmentation (eg. i5-3570K had overclocking but no IOMMU, i5-3570 had IOMMU but limited overclocking). That practice died off approximately when Thunderbolt started to catch on, because not having an IOMMU when using Thunderbolt would have been very bad.