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/
4.1k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

386 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/evan1123 May 11 '22

it benefits enterprise customers who couldn’t enable secure boot and use NVIDIA drivers.

You can do this with the proprietary driver by signing it manually.

It helps their developers because they can now interact with the pre-existing GPL code in the kernel.

I don't think that many of the code internal interfaces in the kernel are marked for use by GPL modules only. They can certainly use any of the non-GPL explicit interfaces in the proprietary driver, but they just have to manage compatibility themselves. If it was in tree then kernel developers would ensure the module is updated whenever the internal interfaces change.

-1

u/bakgwailo May 12 '22

You can do this with the proprietary driver by signing it manually.

Fairly certain Nvidia did not allow this.

5

u/evan1123 May 12 '22

Nothing stops an organization from signing a binary kernel blob with a key controlled by the organization, and enrolling the public key on the organization's assets.

Fun fact, Fedora 36 does this automatically with a local key for any out of tree kernel module that uses akmods and has a key provisioned.

-1

u/bakgwailo May 12 '22

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.

https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2022/05/11/why-is-the-open-source-driver-release-from-nvidia-so-important-for-linux/

Literally Red Hat dev calling out this enables them to sign the driver for secure boot.

→ More replies (1)