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The New Rust-Written NVIDIA "NOVA" Driver Submitted Ahead Of Linux 6.15 (www.phoronix.com)

submitted 1 day ago by Alphane_Moon to c/linux

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 day ago (14 children)

Somewhere, somebody's having a meltdown because Rust is spreading more and more in the kernel.

Good to see that NVIDIA is writing opensource drivers (or starting to). I guess it's too much to ask to support old graphics cards, with NVIDIA mostly caring about money and a linux driver being an incentive to choose NVIDIA over AMD for some.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] CosmicCleric 12 points 1 day ago (12 children)

Somewhere, somebody’s having a meltdown because Rust is spreading more and more in the kernel.

Probably more than just one somebody, based on the drama in these last few week's. 😜

Good to see that NVIDIA is writing opensource drivers (or starting to). I guess it’s too much to ask to support old graphics cards, with NVIDIA mostly caring about money and a linux driver being an incentive to choose NVIDIA over AMD for some.

It's too bad that there's still a proprietary binary layer that this driver will talk to. (I'm assuming right/wrong that it's not open source, since it's binary.)

Best to support AMD if you game on Linux. Really wish Intel would step up their GPU game.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (5 children)

It’s too bad that there’s still a proprietary binary layer that this driver will talk to. (I’m assuming right/wrong that it’s not open source, since it’s binary.)

I must've missed that from in the post. Do you have more information on that?

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] CosmicCleric 2 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

It’s too bad that there’s still a proprietary binary layer that this driver will talk to. (I’m assuming right/wrong that it’s not open source, since it’s binary.)

I must’ve missed that from in the post. Do you have more information on that?

The article mentions the following ...

the NOVA driver is intentionally limited to the RTX 20 "Turing" GPUs and newer where there is the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) with the firmware support to leverage for an easier driver-writing experience.

Also in the same article, there's a link to another article that mentions it a little bit more ...

"... serving as a hard- and firmware abstraction layer for GSP-based NVIDIA GPUs."

I've also read something about it from other places, other articles as well ...

The GSP is binary-only firmware loaded at run-time. The open-source kernel driver explicitly depends upon the GSP-supported graphics processors.

Basically, some/allot of the Nvidia "magic" is in their hardware/firmware, and that they are not open source.

Feel free to double check me on this though, that's just my interpretation based on quickly reading some articles over the last six months or so.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago

Thanks for the links. I'm not versed in drivers, but I expect most to talk to a proprietary firmware at some point. Most computers have a proprietary BIOS they have to talk to, though they do follow open standards. NVIDIA's GSP probably doesn't have open standards. Whether the API is documented might also be an area of concern.