>The day has finally come: 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.
>Many have been wondering in recent years what sort of NVIDIA open-source play the company has been working on... Going back to the end of 2019 have been signals of some sort of open-source driver effort and various rumblings have continued since that point. Last month I also pointed out a new open-source kernel driver appearing as part of the NVIDIA Tegra sources. Well, now the embargo has just expired and the lid can be lifted - NVIDIA is providing a fully open-source kernel driver solution for their graphics offerings. This isn't limited to just Tegra or so but spans not only their desktop graphics but is already production-ready for data center GPU usage.
Nothing was stopping you from using their proprietary drivers this entire time.
Jacob Phillips
Does this mean Nvidia will finally work better with Wayland soon?
Dylan Gutierrez
>NVIDIA will also accept community contributions to the code where there is merit or bugs being addressed, but does require a CLA for signing off on the code to NVIDIA. Yikes
Alexander Lopez
I made a promise to never install W11 on my computer. Currently dual booting Manjaro and 10 because of online games with friends. I'm using an AMD gpu btw.
Jonathan Roberts
Good. Maybe now Linux won't be a huge piece of shit to actually use if hardware is supported out of box.
That just leaves Microsoft capitulating and making UWP dead and porting UWP shit over.
>NVIDIA will also accept community contributions to the code where there is merit or bugs being addressed, but does require a CLA for signing off on the code to NVIDIA. DOA. Literally a sign off on every commit they accept so they can sue you if you cause problems. This will not only deter contributions but also the approval process means the rate at which contributions are integrated will be slow as fuck
Nice. I was planning to get an AMD RX 7900 XT later this year for my Linux workstation, but if Nvidia can pull this off well enough, I might look at an RTX 4080 if it has 16GB VRAM as rumored (I use Blender, which uses a lot of VRAM when rendering, so I want something with at least 16GB VRAM).
>Published the source code to a variant of the NVIDIA Linux kernel modules dual-licensed as MIT/GPLv2. The source is available here: github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules >variant
Loooool It's not the real driver, just some gimped version.
Jonathan Ward
What does this mean for the Nouveau project?
Noah Powell
>It's not the real driver Yes it is you illiterate moron. It says "variant" because for the mean time they are still maintaining the closed source driver along side it.
Joshua Morris
It's better that there's a whole community working on it rather than a small team that sees Windows as their highest priority and Linux as secondary.
Dylan Cooper
Speaking as someone who isn't really familiar with subject, wasn't unreliability of drivers basically main obstacles to run games with high graphic requirements on Linux? Is it reliable enough with this to completely switch yet?
Brandon Ortiz
Not anymore. AMD is very reliable and NVIDIA is "good enough", the main obstacle now is developers refusing to support things like anticheat software on Linux. Wine and DXVK has gotten good enough that 99% of Windows software would just work if it wasn't intentionally crippled.
Jace James
Yeah, but the proprietary drivers have a couple of problems with Wayland atm. I feel confident that this will change things for the better.
Nathaniel Robinson
that dumb penguin needs rape correction
Lucas Wood
No, the main obstacle is that you have to run games through an OS API cope layer (Wine) and a graphics API cope layer (DXVK / VKD3D). AAA games rarely get Linux ports, and when they do the port is often a mess. Who knows if this will ever change. Writing native software for Linux is a chore compared to Windows. Especially now that you're not supporting just a single display server (Xorg) but also a protocol that can have infinitely many implementations (Wayland).
>Writing native software for Linux is a chore compared to Windows I can tell you've never written software for anything. Dealing with Win32 and Microsoft's build system is a fucking chore. >Especially now that you're not supporting just a single display server (Xorg) but also a protocol that can have infinitely many implementations (Wayland) Just use SDL2. That goes for Windows too.
Jack Moore
We all won today.
Luis Butler
>MIT/GPL dual-license
Not too bad.
Josiah Thompson
MIT is the best for a kernel driver like this since BSD can use parts of the code without running into licensing issues. I believe AMD and Intel use it too.
>I can tell you've never written software for anything. Dealing with Win32 and Microsoft's build system is a fucking chore. Cool larp, dipshit. Show me one native Linux GUI program you've written without using any toolkits.
Gabriel Harris
>L O L Unreal Engine uses SDL2. Cool larp, dipshit. >without using any toolkits But why? Don't pretend Win32 isn't a toolkit, it just happens to be the only choice available on Windows.
>Unreal Engine uses SDL2. Not on Windows. I wonder why.
Brandon Smith
So is there still any reason for anyone to buy an AMD card?
Ryder Green
RX 7000 series is allegedly supposed to have a much lower power draw than the RTX 4000 equivalents.
Luis Evans
Most likely because the Win32 code was developed before SDL2 existed. It works fine for them on Linux, it will work for you too. No reason to bother with implementing different backends for X11 and Wayland.
Noah Phillips
You mean the community that ensured that linux is still garbage after more than than 30 years?
Matthew Cooper
Year of Proton gaming.
Jonathan Morales
I'm fine with this, it still means I get all the linux features I like
Jace Cook
That RTX 3090 there sure be lookin' mighty thicc.
Jace Martin
Well, the full driver is unlikely to be open source, just the kernel module for loading it, which itself will basically eliminate any Nvidia-related problems on Linux but some people won't like the userspace driver being closed.
Brody Harris
Does this mean Wayland will actually work properly on Nvidia GPUs? If so, I'm interested, if not, this basically changes nothing for me.
Anthony Bailey
How will changes to the kernel driver fix all the issues NVIDIA has with Wayland?
Juan Long
>which itself will basically eliminate any Nvidia-related problems on Linux Don't be so sure of that, NVIDIA still writes their own DDX driver which is far worse than the open alternatives. It will eliminate most issues though, I agree.
Brandon Morales
Nice, it's day one and there are already community-provided patches coming in.
Anthony Scott
Hope they're being vetted before they're implemented though.
Cameron Murphy
Wayland has barely any issues on Nvidia, and the latest driver fixes things like gamescope and OBS. The kernel module itself won't fix that though, true. True, but people won't be left in unbootable states by kernel upgrades, which is the major thing.
Dominic Rodriguez
>install steam >graphic card is now bricked Can't wait
Christopher Murphy
There's a pull request that's apparently supposed to enable resizable BAR support. Let's see where that goes.
Isaiah Roberts
>True, but people won't be left in unbootable states by kernel upgrades, which is the major thing That didn't really bother me when I was using NVIDIA since rolling back was easy. What really bothered me was the desktop being a stuttery tearing mess. Maybe they're improved that but it was bad back in 2018.
Nathaniel Phillips
>Wayland has barely any issues on Nvidia bait
Benjamin Gutierrez
>barely any that implies there are some at all, wondering what they are and how they get fixed by this "BAR"?
>gayland I get that it's essentially early access right now and still has a lot of work ahead of it but I don't know why people get so assmad about a thing that would fix screentearing and framerate issues on setups with multiple monitors of varying refresh rates, and fix problems like how the game Crimsonland treats my 3 monitor setup in xorg like it's one monitor which basically bricked an otherwise functional game until I turned off my secondary monitors.
Like, what's the problem with wanting that when xorg isn't fixing these issues?
Jace Clark
Xorg is dying.
Charles Sanders
>vrr Meme >multimonitors Meme
Jonathan Rivera
>Linux keeps getting better and better >It gets better exponentially
