NVIDIA Transitioning To Official, Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Driver
7 Hours Ago - Display Drivers - 77 Comments
NVIDIA IS PUBLISHING THEIR LINUX GPU KERNEL MODULES AS OPEN-SOURCE!
To much excitement and a sign of the times, the embargo has just expired on this super-exciting milestone that many of us have been hoping to see for many years. Over the past two decades NVIDIA has offered great Linux driver support with their proprietary driver stack, but with the success of AMD’s open-source driver effort going on for more than a decade, many have been calling for NVIDIA to open up their drivers. Their user-space software is remaining closed-source but as of today they have formally opened up their Linux GPU kernel modules and will be maintaining it moving forward. Here’s the scoop on this landmark open-source decision at NVIDIA.
This is great news. I wanted to buy an AMD GPU for my system to get as much open source as possible but I couldn’t justify the price given the performance. I went with Nvidia instead which had a much more reasonable price per performance. As soon as the GeForce drivers are out of testing I’m changing from the current closed source.
edmonds42 (subscriber, #42670) [Link]
Well, hold up:
“Some GPUs include a GPU System Processor (GSP) which can be used to offload GPU initialization and management tasks.”
Apparently only GPUs with a GSP will be supported by the new open source kernel driver.
This gsp.bin firmware file is a 39 MB RISC-V ELF binary. Sounds like a lot of the kernel driver functionality has moved off the host CPU.
This means basically that, the only drivers being open sourced is the one, where most of the drivers are inside a user space blob closed. Still better than before, but not as open as AMD.
TL;DR They open sourced one of the 3 main components of a GPU, which is “the kernel module”, their firmware and userspace (where CUDA, vulkan and the likes are available) are still closed source.
This means:
- Linux distros can finally include the kernel part without fear of getting sued
- Possibility to sign the driver with secure boot enabled
- Possibility for the Nouveau driver to change the clocking of the GPU (to get on par with the closed source driver performance)
A Red Hat desktop lead have explained it in more details here:
also this guy, sums it up in less then 3 mins
I feel like we should applaud this fact even more than Nvidia 
Initial benchmarks of this “alpha” release already surpassing nouveau, and generally staying around 2-3% behind the proprietary drivers (except for a few cases where it lags 15% behind)
I think most likely this the same code as the proprietary drivers, with certain parts of it ripped off for legal reasons.
this why it’s mostly the same performance, and stable already.
they just marked it as alpha, until they make sure that it didn’t break, while ripping away code…
A very welcome move.
Perhaps even more exciting from a functionality standpoint is NVIDIA enabling virtualization on consumer cards. While I’ve yet to test it, it should mean proper GPU performance for VMs in Linux and preventing the need for dual booting to use the few worthwhile pieces of software without native Linux builds.