You know, I’d feel happy about this but I hear a voice from the back of my head telling me “You know this driver isn’t coming out for the next 20 years.”
But seriously, I think its cool to see Nvidia actually making strides towards an open source driver (if they are actually serious about it, which I’m still skeptical about for no reason in particular beyond past history).
I mean, the open source driver already is out. The nouveau driver has been in the kernel for like a decade now. The userspace part has been in Mesa for just as long, though largely was unused due to nouveau not being able to use high clock speeds. That isn’t the case anymore, and since the beginning of the year you’ve been able to test drive the new NVK Vulkan driver on nouveau with GSP enabled to get actually reasonable performance in several select games. NVIDIA isn’t creating a new driver, they’re contributing to one that already exists. Since this particular patch set is so huge I don’t know it will make it into the next kernel release right away but this guy was the former nouveau maintainer, I expect he knows the necessary standards to get his code accepted.
