It would be helpful if someone checks to see if the hens have teeth because after years of requests and queries, Nvidia has released the source code for its GPU core modules on GitHub.
Nvidia desktop users who want to get rid of the driver executable, however, should temper their enthusiasm because at this time only Turing and Ampere GPUs destined for data centers are deemed production-ready and support features like as multiple displays, G-SYNC and RTX ray tracing in Vulkan and OptiX.
Nvidia said support for desktop drivers is currently in alpha, and users can opt-in if they wish.
The driver package released by Nvidia will contain both the binary driver and the open source driver, with the choice of which to use being made during driver installation.
The GPU maker admitted that its driver was not ready to be upstreamed into the Linux kernel, but was working on it with Canonical, Red Hat and Suse.
“In the meantime, the released source code serves as a reference to help improve the ‘Nouveau’ driver, the company said. ‘Nouveau’ is the name of the open source project that has been working for several years to develop an open source driver for Nvidia graphics.
“Nouveau can leverage the same firmware used by the Nvidia driver and leverage many GPU features, such as clock management and thermal management, bringing new features to the tree-based Nouveau driver.”
Providing more insight, Red Hat director Christian Schaller said in a blog post that the Nouveau and kernel maintainers had met with Nvidia over the past month.
“This is just the kernel part, much of a modern graphics driver is in the firmware and userspace components, which are always closed,” Schaller writes.
“But that means we now have an Nvidia kernel driver that will start to be able to consume GPL-licensed APIs in the Linux kernel, although this initial release won’t consume any APIs that the old driver didn’t already use. .”
Schaller added that the existing Nvidia binary and Nouveau driver will remain in place even when the new open-source driver is developed.
“Immediately, in the short term, it won’t have a major impact. But over time, it does provide a way to radically simplify support for Nvidia hardware,” he said.
“In the long term, we hope to be able to achieve a similar experience with Nvidia hardware to what we can offer today with Intel and AMD hardware, in terms of out-of-the-box features. That means support day to day for new chipsets, a high performance open source Mesa driver for Nvidia and that will allow us to sign the Nvidia driver with the rest of the kernel to enable things like secureboot support.”
The state of Nvidia support for Linux is a long-standing issue. In 2012, Linus Torvalds called Nvidia “the worst company we’ve ever dealt with”, before giving it the middle finger.
Source: “ZDNet.com”