Nvidia Open GPU Linux Kernel Driver Soon Be the Default for Turing, Newer GPUs

phoronix.com

45 points·profwalkstr··10 comments

Iirc a ton of the driver code than really matters (can someone add detail?) is still (and likely forever will be) closed source.

Anything important and proprietary is now in firmware.

The userspace components (GL/Vulkan driver, NVENC, etc) and the firmware remain closed source.

I wonder if these open drivers will be permitted to implement HDMI 2.1 (e.g. 8k resolution)? Apparently the HDMI Forum has told AMD they cannot support HDMI 2.1 in their own open source drivers, which infuriatingly means the only way to get 8k over HDMI on Linux right now is to use Nvidia's closed drivers... Are we about to lose HDMI 2.1 entirely on Linux?

(I know, this is ridiculous and we should use DisplayPort instead. I'm just curious.)

NVIDIA can handle HDMI 2.1 with open-source driver as they punt it off to firmware - https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Firmware-Blobs-HDMI-2.1

Thanks!

Now I wonder why AMD can't do the same.

They could. They probably just didn't because they didn't foresee it being a problem.

Isn't CUDA still incompatible with the open kernel driver?

From TFA:

> ...so far there's no indications of major shifts around going open-source on the user-space driver side, especially around their walled CUDA compute garden.

CUDA has been compatible with the open kernel modules for a while, in fact now that I looked it up, there's at least a handful of features that requires the open kernel drivers, including 1 CUDA specific one (DMABUF support):

https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/550.78/READ...

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