281–290 of 415 posts
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)…
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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.
I came here to say that. This isn't an NVIDIA commitment to open source; it is a slap in the face. Rather than open sourcing the drivers, they are patching the kernel to fit the needs of their proprietary driver. Note that I'm not against proprietary software, however, title of this post was super misleading and NVIDIA needs to grow up and work on an open-source driver. The world will NOT change for them.
What is this effort?
With this announcement, I'm now interested in trying out some Nvidia graphics cards on the Pi again. Nouveau had some issues, and the official drivers had no source available, so I couldn't hack them to work. With the source available... it could be possible! Of course, CUDA support may never happen there, at least not using open source code.
Its a bit too early now isn't it ? The driver is still very alpha, and doesn't support most display stuff.
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Wow! MIT is about as clean as you can go, with no real reserved advantage to dual license etc using Affero GPLv3 or similar. Not bad.
I wonder if this is related: https://www.eetimes.com/wp-content/uploads/Nvidia-hack-secur...
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And hardware companies usually have large test-beds of hardware. So, Nvidia should be able to build a comprehensive test-suite.
the same way they should have been able to build an upstreamable opensource driver all this time, right? lol
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IIRC were some problems with the Linux drivers for Navi 1.0 that continued for about a year after launch. Supposedly those have been fixed. My Vega 56 has been perfectly stable and trouble-free for years.
As a Navi 10 (5700 XT) owner, those problems still exist. It used to be that at least once a week while gaming the driver would crash with some undecipherable error message in dmesg, and because the card had the reset bug the only recourse was to reboot the machine entirely. 4 years later the only thing that's changed is that the crash shows up less frequently (I'd say once every 3 months).
For those who didn't use Nvidia on linux in the old times: The driver was a proprietary binary. Since a kernel module requires interfacing with the kernel API, it could be considered a derivative work and a breach of the GPL license. So, Nvidia provided a small open source shim which interfaced between the kernel and the proprietary module. You had to compile that shim yourself with the right arcane command line inca…
You don't need X11 to run a browser. But you are right that it's pretty inconvenient without.
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There have been reports earlier [1] that processing power of some GPUs is suppressed by software rather than the hardware capability itself. It is frequently easier to mass produce similar chips than to have different chips for different priced devices. I had come across comments in other online forums where the users alleged that some software flags restrict the capability. I hope someone else will link those webpag…
this was the case with RTX voice, a simple regedit made it work on non-RTX cards fine.
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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.
> pay for enterprise vGPU For AMD the driver is difficult to find and poorly documented (and only available on ESXi unlike NVIDIA vGPU support for Xen, Hyper-V, KVM, Nutanix, and ESXi, etc.). At least the guest drivers don't have licensing issues unlike with NVIDIA IIUC.
(and good luck finding a remotely recent AMD GIM driver)
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Ok, we've changed to that from https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-sourc... above. Thanks! Edit: ok, changed back
Uh why would you change from a good, official source to a worse rehash of the same stuff with less detail from Phoronix? I don't even dislike Phoronix, but what was wrong with the first-party source?
If you want to understand this process, you should understand that none of it involves actually reading the articles!