Red Hat Experimenting With "NVK" Nouveau Open-Source Vulkan Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Red Hat Experimenting With "NVK" Nouveau Open-Source Vulkan Driver

Following the recent news about Nouveau shifting code around so their shader compiler can be used outside of Nouveau Gallium3D, Red Hat's Karol Herbst who has been a longtime Nouveau developer has been posting patches for his new "NVK" Nouveau Vulkan driver effort...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Red-Hat-NVK-NVIDIA-Vulkan

[karolherbst]

Michael

actually, the development happens here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/nouve...ts/nouveau/vk/ and everybody is welcomed to send patches.

[karolherbst]

Michael

another thing: "With time this NVK driver will likely be adapted to support the open-source NVIDIA kernel driver as an alternative to the Nouveau DRM driver." the answer to this is: no, it won't.

At least I am not interested. If others think it makes sense from a debugging/development perspective and submit patches we might consider it, but it doesn't make sense to maintain a code path supporting a driver, which won't get upstream.

[Developer12]

Michael

another thing: "With time this NVK driver will likely be adapted to support the open-source NVIDIA kernel driver as an alternative to the Nouveau DRM driver." the answer to this is: no, it won't.

At least I am not interested. If others think it makes sense from a debugging/development perspective and submit patches we might consider it, but it doesn't make sense to maintain a code path supporting a driver, which won't get upstream.

Isn't the nvidia open driver the best candidate for eventual development into an upstream turing-and-later driver?

[karolherbst]

Isn't the nvidia open driver the best candidate for eventual development into an upstream turing-and-later driver?

one might say yes, but after looking at the code, everybody will say no. It would need a lot of effort to put it into shape. Nvidia even mentions it that there are no plans to get it upstream.

If there will be a new driver, or if Nouveau gets enough interest so we get enough people working on it to be stable, that's something we'll have to see.

[mirmirmir]

We gamers need GTX 1060 open source support. It's the bestest, most used graphic card by real customer ever. It's a shame it's not supported. As it ages, Nvidia is surely abandoning it. And community can't do anything about it unless Nvidia step up releasing the source.

[hvis]

Now that Nvidia has released that open kernel module, did that at least open new avenues for the Nouveau project? I.e. being able to interact with newer GPUs (with reclocking, etc) without waiting for additional handouts from Nvidia?

[karolherbst]

Now that Nvidia has released that open kernel module, did that at least open new avenues for the Nouveau project? I.e. being able to interact with newer GPUs (with reclocking, etc) without waiting for additional handouts from Nvidia?

yes, that's what the GSP firmware allows us to do, just need to wire it up (it's being worked on)

[Developer12]

We gamers need GTX 1060 open source support. It's the bestest, most used graphic card by real customer ever. It's a shame it's not supported. As it ages, Nvidia is surely abandoning it. And community can't do anything about it unless Nvidia step up releasing the source.

Nobody needs the source code. People need signed firmware that allows reclocking.

[illwieckz]

We gamers need GTX 1060 open source support. It's the bestest, most used graphic card by real customer ever. It's a shame it's not supported. As it ages, Nvidia is surely abandoning it. And community can't do anything about it unless Nvidia step up releasing the source.

Which GTX 1060? There are 7 products named this way that were released in 2016, 2017, and 2018 (and now you'll see how the GTX 1060 tops the Steam Survey).
Well, they are close enough for a single driver to handle them all, but I always find this fun when people talks about “the” GTX 1060 as if it was one product, GTX 1060 is not a product name, it's the name of a range of products.

Some GTX1060 have different GPU anyway (GP104 or GP106), they're close but even Nvidia does not name them the same. In the past they did that with the 8400 GS who seen three variants (with chip variants G86, G98, GT218) even games have to ship workarounds that are specific to this or that chip that is not the same despite the name.