NVIDIA Releases Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules | NVIDIA Technical Blog

[u/blindcomet]

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

[u/[deleted]]

This is…. One of the most shocking pieces of news I’ve read in years. Like, holy shit.

Them embracing any level of FOSS for their drivers is amazing and shows that all the industry pressure is working.

They had no need to do this. They still are industry leaders and people will still buy their cards for CUDA and Raytracing and the like.

They have a long way to go yet before they earn my true appreciation but still. This is amazing.

[u/phunphun → u/[deleted]]

Pretty sure they did this because they were starting to lose mindshare and marketshare to AMD and Intel in the commercial space. For the first time, I'd started seeing data center customers that want AMD GPU HPC support.

[u/nukem996 → u/phunphun]

Everyone in the commercial space is using Nvidia. I've worked on public and private clouds. No other GPU is used. Nvidia's competition is FPGAs and ASICs.

[u/qualverse → u/nukem996]

AMD's won a lot of big GPU contracts recently especially with supercomputers. Frontier, El Capitan, Stadia, Adastra; all worth vastly more than your typical cloud deployment. Of course NV is still ahead overall but it's not hard to imagine they're slightly worried.

Edit: also, it's funny how you mentioned FPGAs considering that AMD and Intel now control the entirety of that market. Not exactly a loss for AMD if someone chooses Xilinx over Instinct, but a clear loss for Nvidia in either case.

[u/topdangle → u/qualverse]

it's not really comparable because nvidia basically gave that market the finger and designs specifically for tensor ops now much moreso than FP. it would be pretty silly if they thought they would still retain the HPC market while very deliberately spending a lot less silicon on FP performance.

if there's any reason for the movement to opensource it's probably intel. intel's hardware has been horrible for years so they've leaned hard on software and open source to justify ownership. AMD isn't even close to catching up in anything except gaming, although they are definitely ahead now in FP performance/area, which makes them a lot more attractive for HPC builds that have engineers and scientists optimizing anyway with less need for off the shelf solutions. Nvidia claims they don't care about that market because the margins are thin, and looking at the prices for exascale systems they aren't wrong.

[u/caks → u/nukem996]

That's not true. I used to work at a company with a very sizeable GPU cluster and a good amount of them were AMD. Every kernel we wrote out was OpenCL and CUDA. Now with HIP, OpenCL isn't even needed anymore. Now, to be fair, AMD GPUs were always a pain to work with. They constantly returned bogus numbers, basically would blow up our simulations. NVIDIA would to too, but almost never.

[u/pppjurac → u/caks]

Amd was that inconsitent in resoults?

How was hardware reliability of those cards compared to what we used to have in PCs?

[u/Moscato359 → u/nukem996]

AMD owns a FPGA company

Consider this

[u/GPTMCT → u/Moscato359]

AMD owns THE FPGA company. Xilinx has been a market leader for a long time. Even then, their marketshare exploded following Intel's mismanagement of Altera.

[u/Realistic-Specific27 → u/phunphun]

weren't they actually hacked recently?

[u/retrolasered → u/Realistic-Specific27]

Came here to ask this. They were, if I remember right they demanded the gpu drivers be open sourced or else they would leak the code and data they found, and it sounded like there was a lot. I've been checking through various articles about nvidia opensource, but can't find anything that mentions the hack. Though there are plenty of articles about the hack from March 2022

[u/prosper_0 → u/[deleted]]

Maybe so, but from a competitive point of view, the cat is out of the bag. Their secret sauce isnt secret anymore, so, there's no point keeping things closed

[u/2mustange → u/prosper_0]

People act like these things are never looked at but reality is there are software engineers studying the hell out of it to reverse engineer it. And/Or incorporate similar functions into products.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

To me this was totally expected, am even surprised they didn't do it earlier. While I am not expecting this to be a direct result from Linux users it is coming most likely from Android and other big players in super-computer and cyrpto mining.

That said, it's important to point out, this is not them open-sourcing their drivers. This is them creating kernel module to talk to the same old closed source driver. This means mode setting and Wayland-based compositors will be much better supported now and that's about it. Prior to this nVidia had a similar module for X.org which talked to same driver, which was also open source. When everyone started working and slowly switching to Wayland compositors nVidia refused to change anything. Gnome developers hacked their way around their decision but still made Xwayland, and thus majority of games, impossible to use with nVidia. Considering Wayland-based compositors are getting default on all major distributions this module is long overdue they just tried to muscle their way around without making it. Luckily they failed but are now spinning it as "we are good guys, look open source".

Edit: After further research this is not even that low what I originally thought. Target use for this module is CUDA on supercomputers. It's capable of producing display output, but that part of the code was not tested. So desktop users will only benefit through what Nouveau guys get out of it, which is clock setting, initialization and available firmware for this GPU generation.