NVIDIA is only open-sourcing the kernel module. User-space librairies and firmware remain closed source and proprietary.
For comparison, AMD and Intel provide both open-source kernel module and libraries while firmware remains closed and proprietary.
User-space librairies also have a major impact on performance, NVIDIA didn’t make a move towards making these open-source. Also, GPU older than RTX 20xx will not benefit from the new open-source kernel module.
While it will certainly improve things for using NVIDIA GPUs on Linux, it’s nothing revolutionary.
Yes, it is! All of the issues people on Linux have with nvidia come from the binary blob kernel module.
Philosophically, it might not be a huge difference, but it solves the Problems end users had.
What, you’ve never seen that famous city with two Huawei and one Ericsson buildings, a six-floor Eiffel tower, a dozen random pylons per block, blue neon streets and a castle?
It’s more about China heavily subsidizing its tech industry, mainly to disrupt western innovations. Same thing is happening with Electrical Vehicles. Typical capitalist bait and switch.
That’s true, but it’s also true that China has prioritised to make automated factories and investing heavily in just plain better battery tech.
I know alot of the money came from the CCP, but when the investments are done, this new tech will outperform other companies on just being better (thinking of EV specifically).
I think I’m just saying that a state investing in tech and technologies is not a bad idea always.
I personally have not moved to Linux as my daily juuuust yet, so I’m relatively uninformed, but I am curious. What were these “proprietary” versions the article mentions before the open source ones that it’s comparing against? Were they also Nvidia released, just closed source, or would those be from OEMs (Dell, Lenovo, etc) who include Nvidia hardware in their laptops/desktops that are shipping with Linux installed by default?
Closed source Nvidia binaries.
Linux is very open source oriented. So the idea of blindly installing a binary rubs a lot of people the wrong way.
I think it also makes it harder to debug issues, and you are completely at the mercy of Nvidia.
So, open source (even partially) is a step in the right direction.
I think AMD has open source drivers
Yes, the AMD open source drives is what allowed valve to make RADV the steam deck vulkan driver, and with that a lot of fixes, that’s in my opinion the biggest upside, allow others companies like Valve, red hat, canonical,etc to help fix the drivers
Exactly that, and if you have an old version of GPU, Nvidia won’t release updates to work with newer kernel, luckily, there exists community patched binaries to run them in newer kernel and open source driver called nouveau. It is worth trying both setups out to compare the two. Just make sure to use the driver management tool from your distribution to achieve best results.
For example, if you have an older setup with integrated and dedicated GPU, it is mostly required to use the proprietary nvidia driver in order to benefit from that.
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