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Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules

developer.nvidia.com

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Re: Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules

#231

Post by MuffinFlavored »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #214
boberoni wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is not upstreamable in its current form What does "upstreamable" mean in this context? Is this good or bad? As a follow-up, what would need to be different so that it is upstreamable and would that be good or bad?

> What does "upstreamable" mean in this context? Is this good or bad? "Upstream" is the kernel source tree maintained by Linus (and friends). As Linux is open source, anyone can fork it for any reason, and a lot of people do. However, Linus still maintains the common base that people use to build on top of. "Upstreaming" is the process of getting your code included in these official releases. It's significant because…

> upstreaming it is considered extremely good

are we assuming some sort of automatic testing will be added? unit testing? integration testing? sounds super hard to do for a driver. but... high quality code just being merged into master can still have bugs introduced in the future on accident, right? it's tests that usually makes it safe?

Re: Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules

#232

Post by loeg »

dang wrote: post #173
intsunny wrote: post #11

Phoronix link about what this actually means: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nvidia-o... Main takeaways: - support for gaming workstation GPUs is alpha - the user space stuff (OpenGL/Vulkan) is still closed source. (A LOT of heavy lifting is done here.)

Ok, we've changed to that from https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-sourc... above. Thanks! Edit: ok, changed back

Please change it back. Nvidia was the official source and Phoronix is low-quality blogspam of dubious accuracy.

Re: Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules

#233

Post by lawl »

brezelgoring wrote: post #230
lawl wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amd changed their windows drivers to not output video if it detects its running in a VM. Nvidia went the other way and stopped doing so. Both can/could be bypassed with some libvirtd xml magic, but still. Nvidia seem to slowly stop being assholes, AMD started already.

>Amd changed their windows drivers to not output video if it detects its running in a VM. What? Why?

Presumably market segmentation. You're only allowed VMs that dont feel like shit (i.e. have gpu accel) if you pay for enterprise vGPU shit. Can't have someone buy two of your GPUs to give one to a VM, obviously.

Re: Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules

#234

Post by rsaxvc »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #231
Tuna-Fish wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does "upstreamable" mean in this context? Is this good or bad? "Upstream" is the kernel source tree maintained by Linus (and friends). As Linux is open source, anyone can fork it for any reason, and a lot of people do. However, Linus still maintains the common base that people use to build on top of. "Upstreaming" is the process of getting your code included in these official releases. It's significant because…

> upstreaming it is considered extremely good are we assuming some sort of automatic testing will be added? unit testing? integration testing? sounds super hard to do for a driver. but... high quality code just being merged into master can still have bugs introduced in the future on accident, right? it's tests that usually makes it safe?

You can run these sorts of tests in a VM with PCIe passthrough.

Re: Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules

#235

Post by cure »

KronisLV wrote: post #134
TacticalCoder wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I used and recommended ATI and INTEL for most of the people I could for a long time because of this. Same here but recently I somehow got a 3700X and there's no integrated GPU so I had to look for a GPU. I like my PC not just quiet but nearly silent, so a GPU with a fan was a big no-no. I couldn't find any single GPU able to drive 3840x1600 without a fan... Except for a NVidia one. Of course the proprietary Linux d…

If you want to stick with AMD and don't want to swap out the motherboard, then you'd probably just need to get an AMD CPU with on board graphics. The actual name of the CPU should help you find one that would work in that regard, for example, see this link which explains the naming suffixes: https://www.androidauthority.com/amd-cpu-guide-1222438/ In particular: X - Higher clocked desktop processor (what you got) G -…

> For example, some of my homelab servers use older AMD Athlon 200 GE as their CPUs, due to the fact that there are on board graphics and because the TDP is 35W, both saving electricity and also allowing me to use passive cooling (with just a large heatsink https://www.arctic.de/en/Alpine-AM4-Passive/ACALP00022A).

I have a server with a 3700x. I originally had a cheapo discrete AMD graphics card in it, but I ended up just yanking that and running the machine without any graphics card. Saves power.

Re: Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules

#236

Post by kevincox »

brezelgoring wrote: post #230
lawl wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amd changed their windows drivers to not output video if it detects its running in a VM. Nvidia went the other way and stopped doing so. Both can/could be bypassed with some libvirtd xml magic, but still. Nvidia seem to slowly stop being assholes, AMD started already.

>Amd changed their windows drivers to not output video if it detects its running in a VM. What? Why?

Because the drivers for the consumer GPUs are not licensed for datacebter use and obviously VM == datacenter

Re: Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules

#237

Post by kllrnohj »

paulmd wrote: post #228
kllrnohj wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more of an adventure with a GPU than a CPU but you can add an aio after market with eg https://nzxt.com/product/kraken-g12 Then you're not paying the Kingpin markup if you're not planning to x-oc it. I did that on a Titan X (Pascal) which was still using a blower design and it worked fantastically.

This is true, but : you have to watch compatibility (note that there are no 3000 series chips on that list - because NVIDIA changed their hole placement again, and AMD has a couple different sizes for their different chips, 6500XT/6400 is definitely smaller for example), and also it doesn't do as good a job cooling VRAM. You can put add-on heatsinks on the VRAM chips, but they can fall off and short something. And ad…

When I ran it the vram temps were actually fine (although not the scorching GDDR6X variety of course). Since it's not sharing thermal mass with the GPU die, the direct airflow on its own was plenty.

You actually can see this with the 3090 in fact. Simply pointing a fan at the back of the card does wonders and easily keeps them in spec without a heatsink at all, although the backplate is acting as a bit of a spreader. Which makes sense since each memory chip is only like 2-3W. You don't need a heatsink for that, just a little bit of airflow

Re: Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules

#238

Post by mort96 »

mjg59 wrote: post #53

1) This is unambiguously Good News 2) This is not upstreamable in its current form (nvidia admit this in their press release) 3) In an ideal world, nouveau (the open source driver for nvidia hardware) would be able to target this kernel code. Right now though there's no commitment for any sort of stable userland ABI, and that makes that difficult (moving to a new driver version may break interfaces that nouveau uses)…

Sadly, it's also not the actual GPU driver, just the kernel part; you still need their massive closed blob in userspace. Almost had me excited there for a moment.

Re: Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules

#239

Post by dekhn »

I first used OpenGL on linux in 1995. Software-based commercial X server that was unusably slow. By 98 or so I had Mesa, and was running software-based open source OpenGL (still pretty slow, but almost usable). By 2001, I think, I had a FireGL card that was supported in linux doing hardware OpenGL, I think it was a partly open source kernel driver- first time I had competitive performance to lower-end SGIs in the lab). FireGL was then acquired by ATI which sold their cards as high-end and continued the driver. After that I reverted to software for driver reasons, then to the nvidia driver, which I've used on linux for over a decade now. I will give ATI and nvidia credit for having at least some fairly good level of support for linux over the past two decades.

Re: Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules

#240

Post by jakogut »

hansihe wrote: post #121

Note that this is just the kernel modules, not the actual graphics driver. IIRC these sources were already released under a permissive license along with their driver distribution. This just seems to be them putting those sources on GitHub and being more open to contributions.

The kernel driver was never distributed as source. The driver itself was a giant compiled object file that was linked into a kernel module with some shim code using DKMS. I know because I dug through it trying to fix the RTX 2060 in my G14 not going into D3.
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