Nvidia Open-Sourced their Linux GPU Kernel Driver!

nvidia just open sourced their gpu driver for linux but what does that mean can i play halo infinite on linux now can i build a completely open source cuda machine learning system well let's not get ahead of ourselves over in the linux community there's a lot of excitement today because finally after years and years of people asking for it nvidia published the source code for their gpu kernel modules now as someone who's built the linux kernel a few times heck enough that i made a shirt for it i know a bit about gpu kernel modules amd's been publishing open source kernel modules for years starting with their radeon driver and now with amd gpu because of that i and a bunch of other people in the pi community were able to hack that driver and make a graphics card work on a raspberry pi go check out my video on that and nvidia the other big player for graphics cards always published a closed source driver but if you installed it your linux kernel would be tainted nobody really wants a tainted kernel but now you can use their open source driver starting with version 515 and you can keep running a completely open source kernel but if you actually want to do stuff with the driver like play games or run applications that use the cuda cores for ai or machine learning well the user space code for that isn't open source yet so for most users if you want to use nvidia on linux especially right now while support for geforce cards is still in alpha it's probably still best to use the proprietary driver but this is a huge step in the right direction for nvidia some people say they saw the writing on the wall with data center customers not wanting to have proprietary drivers running on their servers other people are suggesting the lapses hack in march might have had something to do with this but nvidia always keeps the cards pretty close to the chest heck maybe it was my gpu on a pi video that finally triggered them to flip the open source switch probably not in any case the source code is up on github now and it's dual licensed under gpl v2 and mit which is pretty cool the open source driver only works with newer turing and ampere architecture so older cards like my gt710 won't work with them according to phoronix it looks like the plan is to stabilize the driver a bit then maybe get it included in the linux kernel someday so the open source nuvo driver could use it at some point nvidia even says they'll accept patches to the driver though you have to accept nvidia's contributor license agreement the open source driver is production ready for data center cards like the a100 already but it's currently an alpha state for use with workstation and geforce cards like an rtx 3080. until next time i'm jeff gearling

Channel: Jeff Geerling

Views: 152,350

Keywords: nvidia, turing, ampere, open source, geforce, rtx, gtx, gpu, graphics, linux, kernel, development, github, git, source, code, release, mit, gpl, gplv2, licensing, proprietary, driver, stack, module, compile, raspberry pi, card, opencl, cuda, opengl, vulkan, ai, ml, machine learning, data center, workstation, now, team green, team red, amd, intel, radeon, amdgpu, tree, files, linus, torvalds

Id: P6fRJLN9VDw

Length: 2min 39sec (159 seconds)

Published: Wed May 11 2022