Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules

developer.nvidia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 415 posts

Re: Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules

#371

Post by PaulHoule »

mort96 wrote: post #238
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.

... and like any new software from NVIDIA it only supports the most recent generation of cards.

In normal times that might be a fair way to get people to upgrade but in the last few years (when crypto bros and scalpers have gotten all the cards) it's been outright cruel.

Re: Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules

#372

Post by arzeth »

marcodiego wrote: post #192
bcatanzaro wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't work on this but I have watched it with interest for a very long time. It has been a strategic initiative in order to improve the GPU compute ecosystem. No one loves having a tainted kernel and everyone who uses a GPU with Linux (which is almost all data center GPUs) would prefer to have the kernel modules open source. It took a lot of work and planning to figure out how to do this over many teams for a very…

Why is the firmware closed source?

So that people could not bypass DRM (Digital Rights Management, not Direct Rendering Manager). And signing the firmware would not help because with source code it is easier to find vulnerabilities in signature verification code. Though they still could publish the firmware partially.

Re: Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules

#373

Post by ridgered4 »

lawl wrote: post #153
jjoonathan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might not even be overstatement. The last few big desktop linux crash-and-burns I've run into all had display drivers as a common component. I like back-foot, underdog NVIDIA. Ascendent AMD hasn't drawn my ire yet, let's hope power corrupts slowly.

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.

Wow, I hadn't heard that AMD added that check. Between that and their unending reset problems that makes them a completely inferior choice for GPU passthrough. Before Nvidia stopped the passthrough blocking you could make a case that AMD was a better choice.

Re: Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules

#374

Post by ridgered4 »

my123 wrote: post #345
snvzz wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus the quality of the overall experience. And I understand NVIDIA is even worse re: GPU virtualization. The end result is that it is unusable in practice. Very difficult and restricted to few CPUs/GPUs and very specific software chain. Otherwise, it'd be open source, universally available and trivial to use. The good news is that I understand this support is actually good on the Intel side, and Intel has promised t…

> And I understand NVIDIA is even worse re: GPU virtualization. Nope, it’s much better on the nvidia side actually. The latest AMD GPU with a publicly accessible OSS GIM driver is the AMD S7150, which was released in 2016. ( https://github.com/GPUOpen-LibrariesAndSDKs/MxGPU-Virtualiza... ) And it’s locked out from most AMD SKUs today, so even if you got a modern GIM driver, you’ll need very special SKUs to enable it…

Given the recent moves by Nvidia I wonder if they'd consider the holy grail of passthrough: Officially supporting (even a single) vGPU on linux so that you could use the card on the linux host and a guest.

The tech already seems possible since people have modded the enterprise drivers to do it, but that isn't official support. A few years ago I would have said there was no chance of this happening from nvidia. But I was also hopefully Intel's dedicated GPUs would support GVT-g back then!

Re: Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules

#375

Post by TomVDB »

PaulHoule wrote: post #371
mort96 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

... and like any new software from NVIDIA it only supports the most recent generation of cards. In normal times that might be a fair way to get people to upgrade but in the last few years (when crypto bros and scalpers have gotten all the cards) it's been outright cruel.

Turing is not the most recent generation of cards.

But that aside, Turing is their first generation that a GPU System Processor (GSP) that runs the heavy binary blob that comes with the open source driver.

Re: Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules

#376

Post by TomVDB »

jjoonathan wrote: post #218
mlyle wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like back-foot, underdog NVIDIA. Ascendent AMD hasn't drawn my ire yet, let's hope power corrupts slowly. That "back-foot" "underdog" nVidia has the edge in the video market still... and 3x the market cap of AMD.

It's fair to extrapolate because their strategic decisions will be based on extrapolations. NVIDIA had to overclock and hustle the current generation of cards and it's looking even worse for the next generation. Software was a moat when AMD was heavily resource constrained, but now they can afford the headcount to give chase. Between the chip shortage and crypto, there was plenty of noise on top of fundamentals, but…

I wish my company were in the same desperate situation as Nvidia. One where we’d be faster than the competition with similar perf/W while using a much inferior silicon process…

Re: Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules

#377

Post by dontlaugh »

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 -…

There is another downside to G SKUs: many lack PCIe 4.0. For some dedicated GPUs, that is a (minor for now) limitation.

It's why I ended up getting the (surprisingly) cheaper Intel equivalent. It has an iGPU and also PCIe 4.0.

Re: Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules

#378

Post by paulmd »

Luker88 wrote: post #327

watch out the fine print though: https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1524615058688724992 34MB firmware Good, but I'll try to stick with AMD. If only AMD's opencl support was better...

we regret to inform you...

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/lin...

AMD still has closed-source binary blobs in their cards too, as does everyone else. Their userland is also closed-source too, just like NVIDIA's.

Re: Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules

#379

Post by anthk »

dannymi wrote: post #339
ZiiS wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The regulations specify they should not be easily changed. Distributing source makes it easier to change.

The carl firmware at https://github.com/chunkeey/carl9170fw should put that argument to rest. That is Wifi firmware source code for the Wifi I currently use. Easily changed likely means there's a physical knob somewhere that you could accidentially poke as a layperson. Not that you get a three year CS education, figure out how your distribution packages dependencies, install the correct embedded toolchain (good luck)…

Also, ath9k as a company.

More libre fw:

https://jxself.org/git/?p=linux-libre-firmware.git;a=tree

People stop talking out of his ass.

Re: Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules

#380

Post by anthk »

ZiiS wrote: post #310
Out_of_Characte wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No law or regulation that I know of specifies binary format.

The regulations specify they should not be easily changed. Distributing source makes it easier to change.

Ah yes?

https://jxself.org/git/?p=linux-libre-firmware.git;a=tree

Post reply on HN