Am I the only one who thinks LAPSUS$ is the only reason nvidia open sourced their driver?
This is a really controversial question.
I kinda.. want open source drivers.
NVIDIA Releases Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules
NVIDIA is now publishing Linux GPU kernel modules as open source with dual GPL/MIT license, starting with the R515 driver release. You can find the source code for these kernel modules in the NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules GitHub page. The first release of the open GPU kernel modules is R515. Along with the source code, fully built and packaged versions of the drivers are provided.
WHAT IF HAPPENED IF HACKER DID OPEN SOURCE IT?
I’m no hacker and my knowledge of programming is limited but I believe you would have to create a custom graphics card driver and bios modification to get the full hash rate from the card. I’ve heard there are walk-around where you can mine two currencies at once but not sure how effective that is.this might also or my not be a good thing about crypto miners and and in tech terms also.
The first release of the open GPU kernel modules is R515. Along with the source code, fully built and packaged versions of the drivers are provided.
NVIDIA Open Sources Their Drivers
the biggest day in the history of linux since it linked up with gnu is here nvidia has finally decided to open source their gpu kernel modules now let me break down what that means in case this sounds like greek to you when you install a linux distro to your system and you have an nvidia card like most people out there you previously had two options you could either install the proprietary driver which works but you’re still going to have screen tearing on xorg systems and basically no compatibility at all with wayland and also on most systems the proprietary nvidia driver is the only proprietary blob that is getting built into your kernel which prevents you from having a fully open source os which can also be seen as a security concern by some people and while i’m not that strongly against proprietary software it’s still really annoying having proprietary blobs running at ring zero built into my kernel the only other.
NOUVEAU (freedesktop.org)
those who don't know what nouveau is its team of programmer/developer which are working on revers engineering the nvidia drivers and its looks they are kinda successful to do so. they have a big chance to make it huge thing after this news , because they have almost figure out the most of part and they can use this module to make a awesome fully working and driver for linux open source they are releasing. its kinda wired you know what the and i have to take a moment to give amd some credit because they’re still the best choice for graphics cards on linux and their open source drivers have been open source for over 10 years the entire software stack for amd has been open source and thus that’s the reason why it was and still is the best choice for video card hardware on linux but now that nvidia is starting to open source their driver there’s actually going to be some real video card competition in the linux space which is great because last generation’s cards were actually comparable in performance at least for gaming in fact the 6900 rtx by amd beats the 3090 in price to performance and gaming workloads since it averages just a few fps slower in some games but is about 30 percent cheaper.
THE WIRED TRUTH ABOUT NVIDIA OPEN SOURCE DRIVER !
now before you pop open a champagne bottle and you go out to purchase yourself two 30–90 ti’s to put inside of your arch linux gaming box and pull a two-week gaming binge there’s a few things that you should know about this announcement first of all the entire driver is not actually open sourced yet in fact the code that supports things like display you know the most basic thing that you would need for gaming isn’t complete or fully tested yet their firmware and their user space software is remaining closed source at least for now all that’s really available right now are the kernel modules you can find them on github under nvidia’s page titled open gpu kernel modules and this code is in a very very early alpha stage there’s a lot of testing that’s going to have to be done and we are ways off before functional open source drivers will be included with something like linux mint which would make it very available to beginners also this open source driver it only supports nvidia’s touring gpus and newer so if you’re someone like me who only has video cards older than the 20 series i have a 1080 ti and a gtx 970 i’m not even able to use these drivers so i wouldn’t hold your breath on this driver being usable for those cards anytime soon because it’s very clear that nvidia is going to be more focused on their newer cards instead of the older ones and even if you do have a 20 series or a 30 series nvidia card and you compile the open source driver and you use it in place of the proprietary binary right now you’re most likely going to see much worse performance if it works at all because like i said display isn’t even fully tested yet compared to the proprietary binary that we already have so there’s a whole lot of testing that needs to take place before this driver can be recommended above the proprietary one especially to desktop linux users and right now a good deal of the commits that are being made so far to this repo it’s just people fixing spelling and grammar mistakes mean that stuff is important don’t get me wrong but there’s been no serious technical patches that have made been made just yet
FUN WIRED PART OF THIS PORTING GPU TO THE TEMPLE OS?
and of course there’s people having a laugh like big fat hairy gamer who wants nvidia to use gender inclusive language in the code because god forbid somebody sees words like poor man no no let’s change that to poor person very very important and then there’s also an issue like this which just got closed to port the driver to holy see in temple os something tells me that this person is one of you guys now this would be pretty cool to use a30 90 on god’s software temple but temple os it doesn’t even support pci in the first place but open sourcing these drivers could be beneficial to other operating systems like the bsd family freebsd also gives you the option of using the proprietary nvidia driver binary but i have a feeling once enough testing and bug fixes are done to this code that the open source driver
THE BENEFITS AND CONCLUSION !
after all it will especially bring a performance boost to a lot more workloads outside of gaming especially in the enterprise server space and machine learning space this new out of tree open source kernel driver has already been tested to support cuda use cases on data center gpus and i think that that is the real reason why nvidia went ahead and gave us this source code because nvidia has been losing ground to amd in this area of computing this enterprise space In fact amd has been beating both nvidia and intel in the space of enterprise hardware that’s part of the reason why i built my new workstation with at thread ripper instead of a xeon orhigh-end intel cpu because amd is just better now i have heard a lot of speculation from people that this driver release is actually nvidia complying with the demands of the hacker gang lapsis who hacked nvidia two months ago and they demanded that they release all of their driver source code under a fast license as part of their demand to prevent them from releasing the one terabyte of data that lapses had stolen from nvidia but i highly doubt that this has anything to do with nvidia’s decision because compliance with that demand was never actually met we don’t have the full software stack like we do with amd andall of the code except when it is linked together to form a linux kernel moduleis under an mit license which is not actually false butlet’s remain positive here this is really huge for novu those devsare probably bouncing up and down celebrating this because they’ve already got the user land stuff open sourced with me also what i’m looking forward to the most are the novu devs making serious improvements on their open source driver and getting it to work decently on newer hardware even if it was 10 worse than nvidia’s proprietary driver i would probably makethe switch to that just so that i coul dhave a fully open source linux kernel running on my system and then now that ithink about i wouldn’t really have any closed source software on my system atall except for games you know i still like to play some games from time totime and i don’t see the devs of noita open sourcing that anytime soon but that’s fine i i don’t feel sketched outrunning closed source games on my system personally if you do hey that’s on youyou don’t have to run games on your system and i guess that there is hope that nvidia will fully open source their driver eventually but i wouldn’t hold my breath on that one either but ladies and gentlemen i am officially declaring this the summer of linux thisis the biggest victory that we have had in a long time like and contact the algorithm follow me on odyssey and have a great day
resource →
1)YouTube video by mental outlaw
2)official announcement of NVIDIA
3)GitHub repository page of nvidia
4)website of novu
5)reddit comments and post subreddit like r/linuxmemes r/linux
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