NVIDIA released the r515 driver version of its Linux GPU kernel module yesterday, which is open source and dual GPL / MIT licensed. This news triggered the emotions of countless Linux developers. Previously, due to NVIDIA's closed source drive, Linux developers all over the world "suffered from NVIDIA for a long time".
NVIDIA also attracted criticism from Linus, the father of Linux, because of its "self-care and play" attitude. The latter expressed serious dissatisfaction with NVIDIA because of its lack of support for Linux at an event 10 years ago. And left the classic scene of "vertical middle finger".
At present, the code of the kernel module has been downloaded on GitHub. It is reported that at present, only the GPU code of the data center is fully available, and the code of geforce and workstation GPU is still "alpha quality".
Open source Linux and heterogeneous NVIDIA
Product managers Shirish baskaran, RAM cherukuri, Linux OpenGL Driver Engineer Andy ritger and senior product marketing manager Fred Oh said in a blog post, "this version is an important step towards improving the experience of using NVIDIA GPU in Linux, making the driver and operating system more closely integrated, so that developers can better debug and feedback."
Linux is the most famous open source operating system in the world. Because it is completely free and open source, it is deeply loved by developers. Developers can easily view the available code used to create the Linux kernel and carry out error repair and program development based on it. At the same time, Linux has higher stability and security, and the probability of process crash or jamming is very low. For developers, the development environment of Linux is also more friendly. Generally speaking, Linux is a platform that advocates sharing and "people gather firewood and flame high".
Previously, NVIDIA looked more like an alien.
Compared with its strong competitor AMD's announcement of open source Linux graphics card driver six years ago, NVIDIA's pace is obviously slower. Although NVIDIA has been actively involved in the development of Linux graphics card drivers, it has not adopted the open source approach.
NVIDIA also received a middle finger and a national curse from Linus, the father of Linux, because of its weak support for Linux.
Linus once said in 10 years that NVIDIA was "the most troublesome company we deal with."
As a strong supporter of open source, Linus has always hoped that NVIDIA can open source driver. Now his wish was finally realized ten years after the famous middle finger of NVIDIA appeared on the camera.
Open source is a small step and Linux is a big step
With fully built packages and source code, developers will be able to more easily package drivers into their software libraries. NVIDIA said that after the phased introduction of the GSP driver architecture in the past year, the code is now ready for the data center GPUs supporting Turing and ampere series, and has tested various workloads to ensure that it is equivalent to the characteristics and performance of the non open source kernel drivers previously running on these GPUs.
In terms of applicability, the open source driver and previous programs apply the same firmware and user mode stack, and can be used on GPUs with two different architectures of 20 series and 30 series.
Technology media Tom's hardware believes that one of the main goals of NVIDIA's launch of open source drivers is to improve support for supercomputers and large data centers, but the situation of home users is not so optimistic. According to NVIDIA, they will improve this throughout the next year.
The drivers released by NVIDIA will include previous versions of drivers and open source drivers, and the user decides which driver to use during driver installation. NVIDIA acknowledges that its drivers are not ready to go upstream of the Linux kernel, but it will work with Kaiyuan solution providers canonical, red hat and SUSE to do so. NVIDIA also said that the released source code can be used as a reference to improve the nouveau driver.
After NVIDIA announced the release of open source drivers, Christian Schaller, director of red hat, said in a blog post that Nouveau and kernel maintainers had been meeting with NVIDIA over the past month.
In this blog post, Christian gives a detailed interpretation of the possible impact of the open source driver released by NVIDIA.
"A large part of modern graphics drivers can be found in firmware and user space components, which are still closed source code," Schaller wrote.
"But this does mean that we now have an NVIDIA kernel driver that will be able to use the GPL only API in the Linux kernel, although this initial version did not add a new API compared with the old version."
Schaller added that even if new open source drivers are built, the existing NVIDIA binary and Nouveau drivers will continue to exist.
"It won't have a significant impact in the short term. But over time, it provides a fundamentally simplified way to support NVIDIA hardware," he said.
"In the long run, we hope NVIDIA can achieve the same" out of the box "experience as AMD and Intel today. There is still a lot of work to be done. "