NVIDIA is now publishing Linux GPU kernel modules

[gustaveriksson1496]

So apparently NVIDIA is now supporting Linux operating systems. Any Linux fans that are excited about this or will you continue to use Windows?

 

[Brian_B]

Seems more like an F U to valve for going with an AMD APU than anything given the timing

 

[Stoly]

So apparently NVIDIA is now supporting Linux operating systems. Any Linux fans that are excited about this or will you continue to use Windows?

What are you talking about?, nivdia has been supporting Linux for decades and for the longest time their drivers have been every bit as good as the windows drivers.

You mean now they are open source? who cares? o yeah that 0.000001% programmer who wanto to mess with them for some reason.

 

[Brian_B]

What are you talking about?, nivdia has been supporting Linux for decades and for the longest time their drivers have been every bit as good as the windows drivers.

They are now releasing an open source version, which they have not done previously.

NVIDIA Releases Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules | NVIDIA Technical Blog

The first open-source release of GPU kernel modules for the Linux community helps improve NVIDIA GPU driver quality and security.

developer.nvidia.com

 

[Brian_B]

You mean now they are open source? who cares? o yeah that 0.000001% programmer who wanto to mess with them for some reason.

It also allows them to be included with those distros that restrict proprietary packages by default. And it can help prevent older hardware from becoming obsolete, by allowing the community to continue driver development after official support is gone.

But yeah, realistically and in the immediate term, it doesn't really change anything, unless they leak their DLSS code or something inside the driver...

 

[gustaveriksson1496]

What are you talking about?, nivdia has been supporting Linux for decades and for the longest time their drivers have been every bit as good as the windows drivers.

You mean now they are open source? who cares? o yeah that 0.000001% programmer who wanto to mess with them for some reason.

Thanks for clarifying, I had no idea NVIDIA always supported Linux. I must have misread the article on NVIDIA's site, it sounded new.

 

[Brian_B]

Thanks for clarifying, I had no idea NVIDIA always supported Linux. I must have misread the article on NVIDIA's site, it sounded new.

nVidia has published a proprietary driver for a really long time now, and has supported Linux fairly well. It's just the driver code was never made open source.

 

[Stoly]

Thanks for clarifying, I had no idea NVIDIA always supported Linux. I must have misread the article on NVIDIA's site, it sounded new.

For years nvidia was the hardware of choice for linux as the drivers were (are) top notch, it took decades for ATI/AMD to reach parity even with open source drivers, AMD/ATI was not quite good (to put it blunty) with OpenGL on windows, it was abismal on linux.

BTW don't think for a second that AMD/ATI open sourced its drivers because of their good hart. They didn't have the time, man power, nor resources to develop their own linux drivers, so in AMD's fashion they let the community make them.

I mean its good that nvidia has open sourced its linux drivers, but I don't feel like they are needed as much as AMD drivers were back then.

 

[LazyGamer]

Looking forward to having these in Fedora at some point - Fedora is still quite straightforward to get running with an Nvidia GPU regardless, but a 'naked' config has its appeal.

Not quite interested enough to go see if they've gotten Nvidia and Wayland working seamlessly yet though, lol.

 

[DrezKill]

Not quite interested enough to go see if they've gotten Nvidia and Wayland working seamlessly yet though, lol.

Explicit GPU Synchronization Merged For XWayland - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com

"...notably takes care of a number of NVIDIA driver problems on Wayland in the process."

"NVIDIA is also expected to have out a new Linux binary driver release soon for ironing out their Wayland support with explicit sync capabilities."

I wonder if soon I will FINALLY be able to use Wayland on nVidia. I ain't holding my breath though.

 

[LazyGamer]

I wonder if soon I will FINALLY be able to use Wayland on nVidia. I ain't holding my breath though.

No idea; honestly not sure what my XPS15 winds up using across distros/DEs that support Wayland since it has an Intel iGPU too. I do have a separate rarely-used system that I could trial Nvidia (only) + Wayland once this release hits distros.

 

[DrezKill]

KDE's Busy Week With Landing Explicit Sync & Many Other Changes - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com

"KWin explicit sync support was merged to much excitement. Wayland explicit sync support is coming together in the ecosystem for improving the NVIDIA proprietary driver support and making Wayland more robust in general."

This week in KDE: Explicit Sync

This week something big got merged: support for Explicit Sync on Wayland! What does this do? In a nutshell it allows apps to tell the compositor when to display frames on the screen, reducing laten…

pointieststick.com

"In a nutshell it allows apps to tell the compositor when to display frames on the screen, reducing latency and graphical glitches. The effect should be particularly noticeable with NVIDIA GPUs, which only support this rendering style, and not having support for it on Wayland was the most common source of random graphical glitches and slowdowns."

Explicit sync

Recently news went around about explicit sync being merged into Wayland protocols, and in the wake of that I saw a lot of people having questions about it, and why it was such a big deal… So here’s a short-ish explanation of what it is, why it’s needed and what the benefits are over the old model.

zamundaaa.github.io

"...The proprietary NVidia driver doesn’t support implicit sync at all, and neither commonly used compositors nor the NVidia driver support the first explicit sync protocol, which means on Wayland you get significant flickering and frame pacing issues. The driver also ships with some workarounds, but they don’t exactly fix the problem either..."

"With the explicit sync protocol being implemented in compositors and very soon in Xwayland and the proprietary NVidia driver, all those problems will finally be a thing of the past, and the biggest remaining blocker for NVidia users to switch to Wayland will be gone."