NVIDIA Releases Drivers With Openness Flavor
by Arsenijs Picugins, May 13, 2022
- https://hackaday.com/2022/05/13/nvidia-releases-drivers-with-openness-flavor/

"This year, we've already seen sizeable leaks of NVIDIA source code,
and a release of open-source drivers for NVIDIA Tegra. It seems
NVIDIA decided to amp it up, and just released open-source GPU
kernel modules for Linux. The GitHub link named
open-gpu-kernel-modules has people rejoice, and we are already
testing the code out, making memes and speculating about the
future. This driver is currently claimed to be experimental, only
"production-ready" for datacenter cards - but you can already try
it out!
The Driver's Present State
Of course, there's nuance. This is new code, and unrelated to the
well-known proprietary driver. It will only work on cards starting
from RTX 2000 and Quadro RTX series (aka Turing and onward). The
good news is that performance is comparable to the closed-source
driver, even at this point! A peculiarity of this project - a good
portion of features that AMD and Intel drivers implement in Linux
kernel are, instead, provided by a binary blob from inside the GPU.
This blob runs on the GSP, which is a RISC-V core that's only
available on Turing GPUs and younger - hence the series limitation.
Now, every GPU loads a piece of firmware, but this one's hefty!" ...

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