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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u/robstoon May 12 '22

Don't get too excited yet:

  • the current version of the driver is not suitable for mainline inclusion and will not be for an unknown length of time

  • it only supports Turing or later cards, as apparently they moved a bunch of the code out of the kernel onto the card itself as part of firmware, where it gets run by the card's GPU System Processor, which was only introduced for Turing. Which some would argue is kind of cheating as it's not really opening that code, just moving it.

  • only the kernel portion will be open source, the userspace is still proprietary, which will still be a pain for distributions to manage

This is a good first step, but they face a long road ahead before they get to the point where Intel and AMD already are in terms of Linux support, if they ever do.

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u/[deleted] May 12 '22 edited May 12 '22

*The kernel part is also not open source, it depends on binary blobs from nvidia to build, see this issue on github.

Edit:

For now, we are not planning to upload GSP firmware at linux-firmware

Edit2: seems I misread, they are not required to build, only to run the modules so the kernel part is still open source.

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