NVIDIA, Linux drivers for video cards become open source

NVIDIA he decided to open source your Linux drivers. After years of community inquiries, the company announced availability on a special repository on GitHub of the moduli “Linux GPU kernel” belonging to the R515 release and published as open source with double GPL / MIT license. Instead they remain closed-source user space libraries and part of the OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL and CUDA drivers.

According to Ram Cherukuri, senior product manager for the CUDA platform and DLA software, this development marks “a significant step forward in improving the experience of using NVIDIA GPUs in Linuxfor tighter integration with the operating system and to allow developers to debug, integrate and actively contribute. “

Opening the drivers will allow you to improve their quality and safety thanks to community input and review. “With each new driver release we will post a snapshot of the source code on GitHub. Le proposed patches from the community they will come revised and integrated if approved in future driver releases “.

The breakthrough release, the R515, currently defined as “Ready for production” for datacenter GPUs based on Turing and Ampere architectures. “This has been possible thanks to the phased introduction of the GSP driver architecture over the past year, designed to make the transition easy for NVIDIA customers. We have focused on testing a wide variety of workloads to ensure the parity in terms of functionality and performance with the proprietary driver in kernel mode“.

As for the GeForce GPUs and those workstations, the driver must be understood as “alpha” quality. According to NVIDIA, users can use this driver on Turing and Ampere GPUs to run Linux desktop systems and handle features such as multiple displays, G-SYNC, NVIDIA RTX ray tracing in Vulkan, and NVIDIA Optix. The company anticipates that “more robust and comprehensive support for GeForce and Workstation GPUs will come with later releases and open kernel modules will eventually replace the closed-source driver “.

Owners of Turing and Ampere GPUs can choose which modules to install, while pre-Turing customers will have to continue to turn to closed source modules.

NVIDIA says it has collaborated with Canonical, Red Hat and SUSE for packaging, implementation and support model in order to meet the needs of common customers. Further information can be found at this address.