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.
absurdly rare NVIDIA W
I’m cautiously optimistic. While I could see NVIDIA hiring him to stifle nouveau development, it doesn’t really seem worth it when he already quit as maintainer and Red Hat is already working on nova, a replacement for nouveau. I got into Linux with Ubuntu 6.06 and remember the situation then. NVIDIA and ATI both had proprietary drivers and little open source support, at least for their most recent chipsets of the time. I was planning on building a new PC and going with an NVIDIA card because ATI’s drivers were the hottest of garbage and I had a dreadful experience going from a GeForce 4 MX420 to a Radeon X1600Pro. However, when AMD acquired ATI they released a bunch of documentation. They didn’t immediately start paying people to write FOSS Radeon drivers, but the community (including third party commercial contributors) started writing drivers from these documents. Radeon support quickly got way better. Only after there was a good foundation in place do I remember seeing news about official AMD funded contributors to the Mesa drivers. I hope that’s what we’re now seeing with NVIDIA. They released “documentation” in the form of their open kernel modules for their proprietary userspace as well as reworking features into GSP to make them easier to access, and now that the community supported driver is maturing the see it viable enough to directly contribute to.
I think the same may have happened with Freedreno and Panfrost projects too.
This is my cautious optimism here. I hope they follow this path like the others and not use this to stifle the nouveau project. Besides, stifling one nouveau dev would mean no other nouveau/nova/mesa devs would accept future offers from them. They can’t shut down the open driver at this point, and the GSP changes seem like they purposely enabled this work to begin with. They could’ve just kept the firmware locked down and nouveau would’ve stayed essentially dead indefinitely.
I bet this is just an attempt at getting away a core contributor then reducing their productivity or diverting their attention from Nouveau. That, or they are really trying to opensource their driver. Given their history, I seriously doubt it.
Fuck NVIDIA
I have to think that nvidia isn’t dumb enough to look around at their competitor’s linux support, and look at the reliance on linux for compute in datacenters, and look at their pile of fancy new AI chips that they’re going to try to sell to data centers, and think to themselves, “ahh, I know the best move, poach the best nvidia linux dev in the world so that ~2% of gamers are forced to use our proprietary driver!”
My guess is they’re doing this to make money on AI, they couldn’t care less about linux gaming. If we get an open source driver out of the deal, I won’t complain, but I bet the consumer GPU driver has little to do with why they hired him.
I don’t really see why they would hire him to achieve this goal. He had already quit as maintainer. He was out of the picture unless he resigned specifically due to accepting an offer from NVIDIA, but if that was the case and they wanted Nouveau stopped then why is he now contributing a huge patchset? If they hired him and he quit nouveau they could’ve had him work on the proprietary driver or their own open out of tree kernel driver, but they specifically had him (or at least allowed him) to keep working on nouveau.
Also, if they really wanted to EEE nouveau into oblivion, they would need to get every single prominent nouveau, nova, and NVK developer on payroll simultaneously before they silence them all because once one gets silenced why would any of the others even consider an NVIDIA offer? Especially those already employed at Red Hat? It doesn’t really make sense to me as an EEE tactic.
What has been apparent over the past few years is that NVIDIA seems to be relaxing their iron grip on their hardware. They were the only ones who could enable reclocking in such a way that it would be available to a theoretical open source driver and they did exactly that. They moved the functionality they wanted to keep hidden into firmware. They had to have known that doing this would enable nouveau to use it too.
Also, they’re hopping on this bandwagon now that NVK is showing promise of being a truly viable gaming and general purpose use driver. Looking at the AMD side of things, they did the same thing back when they first started supporting Mesa directly. They released some documentation, let the community get a minimally viable driver working, and then poured official resources into making it better. I believe the same situation happened with the Freedreno driver, with Qualcomm eventually contributing patches officially. ARM also announced their support of the Panfrost driver for non-Android Linux use cases only after it had been functionally viable for some time. Maybe it’s a case of “if you can’t beat them, join them” but we’ve seen companies eventually start helping out on open drivers only after dragging their feet for years several times before.
Well, this is better news than him being completely gone from driver dev which has been the situation for months now. He formally resigned.
Of course, this may have already been in the works and the reason he left to begin with. Either way, good to see him back.
Things seems about to be in a pretty good spot NVIDIA wise. I do not use any of their recent gear so I do not care directly. That said, it will be good to have NVIDIA working well with Wayland just to remove the substantial amount of noise NVIDIA issues add to that project.
What would nvidia gain by making people not develop noveau? Genuinely curious.
Nvidia, good call. Take the easy win
