The meat of the drivers is still proprietary, this just allows them to be loaded without a proprietary kernel module.
So my guess is it's to do with LLMs. They are all in on AI, and having more of their code be part of training sets could make tools like ChatGPT/Claude/Copilot better at generating code for Nvidia GPUs.
The best solution is to have the industry eat their dogfood.
A bit sad, but hey, welcome anyways.
What really changed the situation is that Turing architecture GPUs bring new, more powerful management CPU, which has enough capacity to essentially run the OS-agnostic parts of driver that used to be provided as blob on linux.
"Open Drivers" from nVidia include different firmware that utilizes the new-found performance.
So you better actually use IOMMU
Same thing with USB3/TB-controllers, NPUs, etc that everybody just expects to be perfectly implemented to spec, with flawless firmwares.
Also, Hyperthreading wasn't itself faulty or "bugdoored". The tricks necessary to get high performance out of CPUs were, and then there was intel deciding to drop various good precautions in name of still higher single core performance.
Fortunately, after several years, IOMMU availability becomes more common (current laptop I'm writing this on has proper separate groups for every device it seems)
[1] There's always the OpenBSD of navel gazing about writing "secure" C code, becoming slowly obsolescent thanks to being behind in performance and features, and ultimately getting pwned because your C focus and not implementing "complex" features helping mitigate access results in pwnable SMTPd running as root.
So as a chipset creator company director it would seem like a no-brainer to me to have to tell my engineers unfortunately to not fix some exploitable bug in the IOMMU/Chipset. Unless I want to never sell devices that could potentially be used to move citizens internet packets around in a large scale deployment.
And implement/not_fix something similar in other layers as well, e.g. ME.
The very point of Lawful Interception involves explicit, described interfaces, so that all parties involved can do the work.
The systems with LI interfaces also often end up in jurisdictions that simultaneously put high penalties on giving access to them without specific authorizations - I know, I had to sign some really interesting legalese once due to working in environment where we had to balance both Lawful Interception, post-facto access to data, and telecommunications privacy laws.
Leaving backdoors like that is for Unlawful Interception, and the danger of such approaches is greatly exposed in form of Chinese intelligence services exploiting NSA backdoor in Juniper routers (infamous DRBG_EC RNG)
Is this feature commonly present on PC hardware? I've only ever read about it in the context of smartphone security. I've also read that nvidia doesn't like this sort of thing because it allows virtualizing their cards which is supposed to be an "enterprise" feature.
I don't know if that's what's happening here, honestly, but you're right that they don't care about being shamed, but building a reputation of being hard to work with and target, especially in a growing market like Linux (still tiny, but growing nonetheless, and becoming significantly more important in the areas where non-gaming GPU use is concerned) can start to erode sales and B2B relationships, and the latter particularly if you make the programmers and PMs hate using your products.
What competition?
I do agree that companies don’t really care for public sentiment as long as business is going as usual. Nvidia is printing money with their data center hardware [1] where half of their yearly revenue comes from.
https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financia...
Isn't Linux 80% of their market? ML et al is 80% of their sales, and ~99% of that is Linux.