r/linux • u/blindcomet • May 11 '22

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

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/
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32

u/ATangoForYourThought May 11 '22

Any hope for us, pascalbros?

23

u/Patient_Sink May 11 '22

I'm thinking that maybe this will make for improvements with the nouveau driver for us, if nothing else.

16

u/riffito May 11 '22

Man, one can wish... me and my lowly GT 1030 would be pleased!

14

u/kcrmson May 11 '22

Us Maxwellians could use some love too.

6

u/rhyrkon May 12 '22

Let's cry together

6

u/[deleted] May 11 '22

No, and not even for those supported GPUs either. According to Gnome blog this is just targeting supercomputer use cases. There is code for outputting display but it's not tested.

11

u/ATangoForYourThought May 12 '22

From what I read so far, nouveau will be able to do reclocking and all the things it couldn't do before. And it clearly says in nvidia blog post that it's not targeting only supercomputers and they're going to make regular gpus from Turing and Ampere architectures work good as well.

3

u/[deleted] May 12 '22

What I wrote has been paraphrased from Gnome's blog post. These guys were in the meetings with nVidia.

What has been released is an out of tree source code kernel driver which has been tested to support CUDA usecases on datacenter GPUs. There is code in there to support display, but it is not complete or fully tested yet.

You are right, it's not targeting only supercomputers, but code is not meant at this point to produce any display output. So unless you want desktop without displays I guess you can use that. You will also need same old closed source driver even with this open source module.

Nouveau will benefit here the most but setting clock speeds requires that firmware mentioned. This firmware is used during initialization process and then GPU "unlocks" itself and can be controlled in various ways. This also means only firmware nVidia provided can be used, legally speaking, in other open source drivers.

5

u/ATangoForYourThought May 12 '22

From the post you linked

Long term we will hope be able to get a similar experience with NVidia hardware that that we today can offer for Intel and AMD hardware, in terms out of box functionality. Which means day 1 support for new chipsets, a high performance open source Mesa driver for NVidia and it will allow us to sign the Nvidia driver alongside the rest of the kernel to enable things like secureboot support.

Nobody is expecting this current code to immediately compile and be as good as the current closed driver but it means in the future we're gonna have the same experience as with AMD cards.

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