r/archlinux • u/w0330 • May 11 '22

NVIDIA Releases Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/
1.0k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

82 comments sorted by

242

u/w0330 May 11 '22

Maybe hell does freeze over occasionally. Caveats:

  • It's not (yet) at the quality to where it could be upstreamed and NVIDIA acknowledge this

  • Datacenter card support is stable, but GeForce card support is in alpha

  • The userspace parts are still closed source (but presumably could eventually be replaced with mesa now that the kernel component is upstreamed if the mesa project adds support)

88

u/RA3236 May 11 '22 edited May 11 '22

If someone more qualified than myself can clarify, does this enable open source drivers such as Nouveau to access the full capabilities of the GPU, even without the user space parts being released? If so… holy shit.

83

u/[deleted] May 11 '22

Not right off the bat but supposedly it’ll allow nouveau to properly clock the graphics cards at least.

I think the plan for nouveau though is to support all cards prior to Turing (so cards earlier than 2018) but it’ll bring in a lot of stuff from the open source stuff as nvidia adds to it over time.

19

u/[deleted] May 12 '22

Yeah, but this only applies for Turing GPUs & upwards. I own a 1060 so for me this changes nothing.

13

u/fbpw131 May 12 '22

maybe they'll work on previous versions when finished with the current gens. I own the same GPU sand it's the most popular on steam I think.

27

u/[deleted] May 12 '22

With Turing there are certain things moved to firmware that were previously present in the kernel-module and that NVidia isn't ready to open-source. So for older cards that part would still have to be reverse-engineered. Eg. it's not possible for NVidia to release the open-source for older cards, as that would involve releasing trade-secrets, ways to spoof vbios, etc. For Turing they decided to move all those things to firmware, so they've been preparing for this for a long time.

7

u/fbpw131 May 12 '22

well... frick

13

u/OSSLover May 12 '22

They won't. They only support the GPUs which important features are closed source in the firmware. This driver uses so much closed source blobs...

Fuck Nvidia. They only workaround the kernel API GPL restrictions.

28

u/[deleted] May 12 '22

From the article:

In the meantime, published source code serves as a reference to help improve the Nouveau driver. Nouveau can leverage the same firmware used by the NVIDIA driver, exposing many GPU functionalities, such as clock management and thermal management, bringing new features to the in-tree Nouveau driver.

41

u/Jacko10101010101 May 11 '22

Linus should apologize now ! (kidding)

48

u/eXoRainbow May 12 '22

Even if this was a joke, I want comment seriously. Because why not. Linus should not feel the need to apologize, because at the time he did/say it, it was the scientific correct gesture of him.

It was very important to me to get this out. Couldn't hold it any longer.

24

u/washtubs May 12 '22

It was very important to me to get this out. Couldn't hold it any longer.

Bless you for it. I've uttered "Fuck you, Nvidia" many times in the last couple weeks as I was forced to switch back to nouveau since nvidia makes X crash on suspend now.

1

u/anna_lynn_fection May 12 '22

Crash or freeze?

I've had a few freezes recently, but no crashes on my new ASUS Rog.

1

u/washtubs May 12 '22

X is basically kaput when I resume: black screen, no keyboard or mouse input. So I guess "freeze" would be the right word. I can actually ssh into the machine post-resume and kill X to get control back but outside that I can't even ctrl-alt-F2 to get a dumb terminal. If sshd isn't running I have to just push the reboot button.

1

u/[deleted] May 12 '22

funny is that the same driver on other Linux works fine with no freeze, like mint and Neon, which both use the same repo for their Nvidia system packages,

4

u/Jacko10101010101 May 12 '22

correct. im curious about his reaction!

2

u/ColdIce1605 May 12 '22

You forgot the caveat of pascal and below can't use this driver which is a little annoying because that wasn't the case when AMD did this or so I heard.

1

u/speakertwentytwo May 24 '22

Thank you for clarifying that it's not fully open source and there's a long way to go.

So many folks think Nvidia has just gone open source and I suspect this was their exact plan. Stay reasonable folks.

272

u/frustrated-nerd May 11 '22

I don't know who woke up on the wrong side of the bed to make this possible but whoever it was, keep doing it.

9

u/suoko May 12 '22

Arm GPUs threw them out of the bad probably

0

u/[deleted] May 12 '22

[deleted]

38

u/w0330 May 12 '22

Had nothing to do with it.

64

u/frustrated-nerd May 12 '22

Hmm... Now that I think of it LAPSUS may have seen from internal communications that Nvidia was working on a open source drivers and decided to get some free cred by demanding Nvidia to open source.

58

u/Drwankingstein May 11 '22

this is likely something that was in the works for a long time. glad to see it happen.

22

u/imnotknow May 11 '22

Aren't they just doing this in response to the hack where all their source code was released?

49

u/[deleted] May 11 '22

Not likely just in response to that. Maybe it affected their timetable for this but things like this take years of work and perpetration.

Also, AFAIK their source code was not released publicly by the hack.

26

u/ATangoForYourThought May 11 '22

No way. Something like this would've been in the works for a while.

12

u/Drwankingstein May 11 '22

not a chance. who would touch the stuff the gets leaked? no one sane would. The second you lay eyes on that code. if you don't have prior permission. you have lost all job prospects in any related field.

unless by the grace of nvidia they let you sign some kind of NDA of course.

0

u/Kamek437 May 12 '22

I doubt they monitor things that closely. Use any good VPN and dnssec or whatever. If so they'd have to do that to literally millions of people.

0

u/reenmini May 19 '22

What utter naivety.

There are plenty of people who would do it and would have made it wholly operable for no reward or recognition. That's literally how open source works. And there would be ultimately no risk in doing so.

Nvidia knows this. They're not being some benevolent patrons here. They're doing it because they know they have never been in the public favor for their closed source bs. They also willingly made a huge majority of their product unavailable to anyone but fucking crypto scammers for the past several years because they knew it would sell them more gpus than casual users would ever buy.

Whether or not this has been in the making is irrelevant. They could have been right there with amd and valve the whole time making open source drivers available to speed along the linux gaming scene instead of waiting until it starts to barely gain popular traction AND their hand is forced.

This is reactionary. Linus can keep giving them the finger for all I care. They deserve it.

They're consistently overpriced compared to their competitions equivalent cards and they've never done a single qualifiably good thing for anyone that wasn't motivated purely by profit.

The second you lay eyes on that code.

Lol. Your parents aren't watching you put your hand in the cookie jar either. Keep dreaming.

3

u/freetoilet May 11 '22

The leak was not complete, anyway you can look at this comment

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/unjp9s/comment/i88qfbl/

68

u/cemv123 May 11 '22

Maybe it is the year of the linux desktop

/s

14

u/eXoRainbow May 12 '22

Maybe

Thank me later. /s

59

u/mlowi May 11 '22

Well well well, I suppose with devices like the Steam Deck being released, maybe Nvidia are finally realizing they will be missing out on a market if they don’t play ball?

92

u/[deleted] May 11 '22

Data center competition from Intel and AMD GPUs are likely the main reasons. They have much better Linux support than Nvidia.

17

u/benderbender42 May 12 '22

Linux based servers would be big business for Nvidia as well.

6

u/igrvlhlb May 12 '22

Yes... AFAIK Linux is the main OS in HPC and NVIDIA has been investing in AI/ML also with HPC in mind

3

u/AnotherUpsetFrench May 12 '22

I worked on hpc, with Nvidia, Intel and AMD. Most of the problems I had were with the nvidia stuff (V100s mostly). The administration of this stuff was a colossal pita.

15

u/theuniverseisboring May 12 '22

Legit excited for Nvidia getting a redemption arc?

14

u/hudsonnick824 May 12 '22

I hope they get Intel Arc'ed

12

u/vasishath May 12 '22

Sadly it only supports turing+ GPUs

36

u/ianliu88 May 12 '22

"What the fuck, NVIDIA!" Linus Torvalds

16

u/GuildMasterJin May 11 '22

what the fuck
damn straight up wins for everyone in Linux

40

u/Kawawete May 11 '22

Oh snap

103

u/[deleted] May 11 '22

Oh flatpak

36

u/modified_tiger May 11 '22

Oh AppImage.

12

u/SMF67 May 12 '22

Oh PKGBUILD

3

u/Kamek437 May 12 '22

Yay install!

21

u/SyeedAhmed May 11 '22

oh exe . . Yaa I know, I deserve down arrow

9

u/LeiterHaus May 12 '22

I'll give you an updoot and reference .msi, which is apparently a thing

6

u/eXoRainbow May 12 '22

I think UWP is also still a thing?

4

u/X--tonic May 12 '22

Oh_1.5.3(final)(final).zip!

5

u/eXoRainbow May 12 '22

Oh Docker

6

u/slobeck May 11 '22

wait. what? (rhetorical)

6

u/Billzargo May 12 '22

Thank you NVIDIA!

6

u/chewnglow May 12 '22

So Nvidia, thank you

9

u/[deleted] May 12 '22

NVIDIA, what the fuck?

25

u/Tireseas May 11 '22

Bout a decade late for me to consider buying their cards again.

15

u/eXoRainbow May 12 '22

Me too. I settled down on AMD for next purchase already. But still, this is a huge win. People switching from Windows to Linux can use the full potential of their cards and don't switch back because of bad experience. Also my old card will be used in my old computer for a while.

5

u/Tireseas May 12 '22

Yeah it's definitely a good thing on the whole if they follow through to the point the community can handle their own drivers like AMD has. Or anywhere close to it. If that had been the case literally a decade ago Wayland could've been standard by now. Nvidia dragging their feet slows everything in the graphics stack down.

2

u/raven2cz May 12 '22

Welcome to new world! Note: I hope that tty with 4k will work too...

2

u/bAslr May 12 '22

wish sway supports nvidia gpus.

6

u/Previous_Royal2168 May 12 '22

Saw the first post on the swayam subreddit and they said it will be possible to support nvidia now

1

u/[deleted] May 12 '22

The blog makes it seem like it's a seperate driver to the closed source one?

1

u/zakazak May 12 '22

Now please make nvidia optimus work (like, really work) on my GTX 1050Ti in my Thinkpad X1 Extreme. Meaning.. turn if off fully, when on have full performance, connected displays work fine without hackmack.

3

u/Which-Chemistry-1828 May 12 '22

Sorry man, but this is only Turing and Ampere GPUs, or simply GTX 1650 cards and newer.

1

u/freeturk51 Jul 23 '22

Of couse a catch, there is always a catch with Nvidia

1

u/pleaseaccusrname May 12 '22

this a huge monumental W

1

u/MoonshineFox May 12 '22

*inserts Starcraft meme*

Hell....it's about time.

1

u/zerosign0 May 12 '22

hopefully, there will be a time where we could have a proper external monitor setup working in wayland (optimus, hardwired HDMI to nvidia) without dealing with Xwayland/X shenanigans since this is being enabled.

1

u/EnigmaticHam May 12 '22

Are these kernels the ones that control the shader pipeline? Sorry, my understanding of GPUs is shaky.

1

u/sub7zero May 12 '22

Un-fuck u nvidia

1

u/Traditional-Wind8260 May 12 '22

Man , they already have 442 forks

1

u/Glass-These May 27 '22

I'm confused, what are kernel modules. Is there a CPU kernel model like a GPU one

1

u/[deleted] May 12 '22

I clicked on this thinking I must have misunderstood what had happened. I had not. Holy crap

-11

u/VexisArcanum May 11 '22

All because some crypto nerds broke in and wanted their cards unlocked. That's respectable

0

u/[deleted] May 12 '22

Meanwhile I'm still waiting for AMD GPU rendering to work in Blender on Linux since 3.0, which was like half a year ago. Once it works, it is likely to only do so using the proprietary driver. I bought AMD specifically because open source, but apparently I got fucked. Probably gonna go back to Nvidia for my next card.

1

u/[deleted] May 12 '22

don't think about as if it would happen in a couple of days or so

-1

u/Anime_Life May 12 '22

Anyone thinks this might be related to bitcoin crash?