Nouveau Patches Posted For Running On NVIDIA GSP-RM Firmware, Initial RTX 40 Ada Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Nouveau Patches Posted For Running On NVIDIA GSP-RM Firmware, Initial RTX 40 Ada Support

The long-awaited patches for allowing the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" upstream Linux kernel driver to leverage NVIDIA's GPU System Processor "GSP" firmware for handling GPU re-clocking and other hardware tasks with RTX 20 GPUs and newer have been posted. With this set of 44 patches also comes the initial GPU hardware accelerated support for the GeForce RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" GPUs that is built upon this new GSP driver code path...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Nouveau-Patches-Run-On-GSP-Blob

[zexelon]

This is awesome news!

TBH I don't see a future where Nouveau holds any sort of performance edge to Nvidia's in house, but hey, a better default experience is still awesome!

[avis]

I know there are nouveau developers on this website, so my question is, is NVIDIA's involvement required to make nouveau/Mesa a real decent alternative to running the closed driver or you now have all the pieces and information to make the open source driver work properly on your own? I ask because I vaguely remember that NVIDIA contributed to nouveau to properly support Tegra, so it would be interesting to learn the details.

Secondly, will nouveau be able to run CUDA/AI/Optix workflows?

Thirdly, is it possible that the nouveau driver replaces NVIDIA's own kernel modules and becomes a sort of "sharable" driver between Mesa and NVIDIA user graphics stack, i.e. just like amdgpu works?

Fourthly, I've heard there were difficulting with the GSP firmware versioning. Could you elaborate on that?

[Barley9432]

A shame that they aren't using NVIDIA's own kernel driver like what RADV does with using AMD's own kernel driver. NVIDIA's kernel driver works wonderfully, never had an issue with it.

[avis]

A shame that they aren't using NVIDIA's own kernel driver like what RADV does with using AMD's own kernel driver. NVIDIA's kernel driver works wonderfully, never had an issue with it.

Except when NVIDIA rarely but royally fucks up: https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-k...les/issues/511

The issue has been known four four months already, it's a complete deal breaker, NVIDIA is yet to address it for certain Turing and Ada users.

[Barley9432]

Except when NVIDIA rarely but royally fucks up: https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-k...les/issues/511

The issue has been known four four months already, it's a complete deal breaker, NVIDIA is yet to address it for certain Turing and Ada users.

I agree that is sad to see, but I disagree that just because issues exist the kernel driver is bad or useless. All software has bugs, especially with one as complex as the kernel driver. The fact of the matter is that right now NVIDIA's own kernel driver is the best option for users, and it should be used by default (even in Nouveau imo) until it is no longer the best option. This attitude of Nouveau of not using it just because it is not upstream in the kernel doesn't make any sense to me.

Well actually it does make sense to me, the people working on Nouveau like RedHat are the ones who benefit from the kernel. From what I see it's not a benefit to the end user but to companies like RedHat.

[avis]

I agree that is sad to see, but I disagree that just because issues exist the kernel driver is bad or useless. All software has bugs, especially with one as complex as the kernel driver. The fact of the matter is that right now NVIDIA's own kernel driver is the best option for users, and it should be used by default (even in Nouveau imo) until it is no longer the best option. This attitude of upstream of not using it just because it is not upstream doesn't make any sense to me.

NVIDIA has never submitted their open source (Open GPU) driver for mainline, so we have what we have. I doubt they will because it's not developed properly.

Ever since it's released, when a new release comes NVIDIA simply strips all the binary pieces from the closed driver and pushes the changes as a single large GIT commit. And these releases don't coincide with kernel releases. This will never work for the Linux kernel. I'm not trying to say or imply it's good or bad, it's just how it is.

Nouveau will be the only open source NVIDIA driver included in the Linux kernel for the foreseeable future.

[Britoid]

I agree that is sad to see, but I disagree that just because issues exist the kernel driver is bad or useless. All software has bugs, especially with one as complex as the kernel driver. The fact of the matter is that right now NVIDIA's own kernel driver is the best option for users, and it should be used by default (even in Nouveau imo) until it is no longer the best option. This attitude of Nouveau of not using it just because it is not upstream in the kernel doesn't make any sense to me.

Well actually it does make sense to me, the people working on Nouveau like RedHat are the ones who benefit from the kernel. From what I see it's not a benefit to the end user but to companies like RedHat.

I'm not sure if this is just a troll or not, it's a bunch of rubbish.

There are a multitude of reasons why Nvidias kernel driver, which is now open source, can't be used or merged.

- It doesn't work with Mesa.
- For a driver to be merged there has to be at least one open source use of it, and nvidias userspace driver is still closed, which can't be freely redistributed
- Nvidias driver uses layers to abstract from the kernel, so they can share code between operating systems, this is not going to fly with upstream development who want people to target Linux.

Then you have the legal concerns of shipping the Nvidia driver, which are slightly less now the kernel driver is open source, but you still have worries about patents and royalities, such as h264 etc, that can be avoided with a clean room open source implementation.

Nouveau using the GSP, using Vulkan only + Zink to me seems like the best bet going forward. Nouveau has been bad until now because of lack of documentation or support from Nvidia. This has changed, by additional documentation and code being freely (Nvidias kernel source code leaked ages before) available, and the GSP meaning the developers don't need to worry about reclocking and power management anymore.

[avis]

Britoid

I don't think kernel developers are concerned about the OS abstraction layer as long as the code itself is decent. And patents and related stuff are not part of it, so there's no pitfalls here.

So it all boils down to userspace and completely incompatible development model/schedule (see my earlier post). The latter I believe is far more important.

[jeisom]

This is great to see. I look forward to the benchmark results in a future article. It will interesting to see how close the opengl performance is between the 2.