Nvidia Open GPU Linux Kernel Driver Soon Be the Default for Turing, Newer GPUs

Nvidia Open GPU Linux Kernel Driver Soon Be the Default for Turing, Newer GPUs(phoronix.com)

45 points by profwalkstr 2 years ago | 10 comments

elromulous 2 years ago |

Iirc a ton of the driver code than really matters (can someone add detail?) is still (and likely forever will be) closed source.

emersion 2 years ago | |

The userspace components (GL/Vulkan driver, NVENC, etc) and the firmware remain closed source.

adamzegelin 2 years ago | |

Anything important and proprietary is now in firmware.

kentonv 2 years ago |

I wonder if these open drivers will be permitted to implement HDMI 2.1 (e.g. 8k resolution)? Apparently the HDMI Forum has told AMD they cannot support HDMI 2.1 in their own open source drivers, which infuriatingly means the only way to get 8k over HDMI on Linux right now is to use Nvidia's closed drivers... Are we about to lose HDMI 2.1 entirely on Linux?

(I know, this is ridiculous and we should use DisplayPort instead. I'm just curious.)

michaellarabel 2 years ago | |

NVIDIA can handle HDMI 2.1 with open-source driver as they punt it off to firmware - https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Firmware-Blobs-HDMI-2.1

kentonv 2 years ago | | |

Thanks!

Now I wonder why AMD can't do the same.

dindresto 2 years ago |

Isn't CUDA still incompatible with the open kernel driver?

aseipp 2 years ago | |

CUDA has been compatible with the open kernel modules for a while, in fact now that I looked it up, there's at least a handful of features that requires the open kernel drivers, including 1 CUDA specific one (DMABUF support):

https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/550.78/READ...

201984 2 years ago | |

From TFA:

> ...so far there's no indications of major shifts around going open-source on the user-space driver side, especially around their walled CUDA compute garden.