NVIDIA's Open-Source Kernel Driver & Maturing Wayland Support Were Great In 2023
Back in 2022 NVIDIA announced their open-source kernel driver and over the past year those open-source GPU kernel modules have matured a lot, which was great to see. They are working out well to complement the proprietary kernel modules long used by NVIDIA GPUs on Linux. Simultaneously in 2023 the Nouveau DRM kernel driver by the open-source community continued to advance and now with Linux 6.7 is initial NVIDIA GSP firmware support, preliminary RTX 40 series support, and more. The open-source community has also been working on the NVK Mesa Vulkan driver with NVIDIA's official Linux user-space driver components remaining closed-source.
Over 2023 the NVIDIA Linux engineers also continued making their Wayland support much more robust and aiming for feature parity to their X11 support. Plus there's been continued Vulkan driver enhancements and other Linux improvements from the green team.
Here's a look at the most popular NVIDIA Linux news on Phoronix from 2023 for those wishing to relive those moments or for news you may have missed:
Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver
The Linux 6.6 modules infrastructure is changing to better protect against the illicit behavior of NVIDIA's proprietary kernel driver.
The Maintainer Of The NVIDIA Open-Source "Nouveau" Linux Kernel Driver Resigns
Hours after posting a large patch series for enabling the Nouveau kernel driver to use NVIDIA's GSP for improving the support for RTX 20/30 series hardware and finally enabling accelerated graphics support on RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" GPUs, the Red Hat maintainer has resigned from his duties.
FreeBSD Experimenting With A Port Of NVIDIA's Linux Open DRM Kernel Driver
The new nvidia-drm-kmod is a FreeBSD port of Linux's nvidia-drm.ko open-source kernel module.
NVIDIA BIOS Signature Lock Broken - What Caused Open-Source Pains For Years
New (Windows) tools have been released that break the NVIDIA BIOS Signature Lock, the "security" functionality in use since the GeForce GTX 900 days around signed firmware/BIOS handling. This authentication mechanism is what in turn has led to the GeForce GTX 700 series still being the best supported series by the open-source Nouveau driver while the GTX 900 series and later have been crippled to their low boot clock speeds due to PMU/re-clocking restrictions. While Nouveau developers have been working on the GPU System Processor (GSP) approach for RTX 20 "Turing" GPUs and newer to workaround this limitation as NVIDIA's blessed path forward, the NVIDIA BIOS Signature Lock has now been broken by Windows modders.
NVIDIA 545.29.02 Linux Driver Released With Much Better Wayland Support
Earlier this month NVIDIA published the R545 Linux driver beta while today it's been promoted to the stable series with the NVIDIA 545.29.02 Linux driver release.
NVIDIA Pushes 62MB Of GSP Binary Firmware Blobs Into Linux-Firmware.Git
As mentioned last week, merged for the Linux 6.7 kernel is NVIDIA GSP firmware support in the Nouveau driver so that these NVIDIA firmware blobs can handle hardware initialization and power management related tasks. This support is optional right now for the GeForce RTX 20 / RTX 30 series hardware with Nouveau but necessary if wanting better performance via re-clocking the GPUs. The GSP firmware is a mandatory requirement for Nouveau with the NVIDIA RTX 40 GPUs and moving forward.
FFmpeg 6.0 Released With NVIDIA NVENC AV1, VA-API Improvements
As was expected given the FFmpeg 6.0 FOSDEM presentation earlier this month in Brussels, this multimedia open-source project is now celebrating its latest major release.
NVIDIA Publishes DLSS Super Resolution SDK 3.1, Including Updated Linux Demo
NVIDIA just published to GitHub the DLSS Super Resolution SDK v3.1, their first software development kit update made public since last May when DLSS v2.4 was the latest and greatest.
Linux 6.2 Released With Intel Arc Graphics Promoted, Open-Source NVIDIA RTX 30
Linus Torvalds just released the Linux 6.2 kernel as stable and marks the first major kernel release of 2023.
It's Recommended To Avoid Using The Open-Source NVIDIA Driver On Linux 6.3
It's recommended to avoid using the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" graphics driver on the current stable Linux 6.3 series as there is a serious bug present that could cause varying issues to your system.
For At Least One Game, Mesa's NVK Driver Can Outperform NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver
In at least one game running on Linux via Proton Experimental, the Mesa NVK open-source Vulkan driver paired with the latest Nouveau reverse-engineered kernel driver is delivering better performance than NVIDIA's proprietary Linux graphics driver.
NVIDIA 525.78.01 Linux Driver Released With Support For The GeForce RTX 4070 Ti
NVIDIA this morning released the NVIDIA 525.78.01 Linux driver as a minor update to the R525 driver series with a few fixes and support for the new GeForce RTX 4070 Ti graphics card.
NVIDIA 525.85.05 Linux Driver Brings Few Fixes
While we await the next post-R525 driver series feature release, NVIDIA today issued their newest production driver update for this current stable series.
NVIDIA Announces The GeForce RTX 4060 Series
NVIDIA today announced the GeForce RTX 4060 series consisting of the $399 RTX 4060 Ti 8GB while in July an RTX 4060 Ti 16GB version will come along with a $299 RTX 4060.
Valve's Linux Contributions, Wayland & Open-Source NVIDIA Milestones Topped 2023
After looking yesterday at the most popular Linux hardware reviews of 2023, here is a look at the most popular open-source/Linux news of the more than 2,780 original news articles authored on Phoronix this calendar year.
NVIDIA 530.30.02 Linux Beta Driver Released
NVIDIA today released their first beta driver in the R530 driver series for Linux users.
NVIDIA R545 Linux Beta Driver Brings HDMI Deep Color, Night Color & FB Consoles
NVIDIA today published their first R545 Linux driver beta series with a number of shiny new features.
Open-Source NVIDIA Vulkan Driver "NVK" Merged Into Mesa 23.3
The NVK open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver has finally been merged into mainline Mesa for easing development of this driver moving forward.
Even Though It's Currently Slow, The Mesa NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan Driver Has Been Making Good Progress
During XDC 2023 this week in Spain, Faith Ekstrand with Collabora provided a status update on the NVK Vulkan driver that continues to be developed inside Mesa for providing open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver support.
NVIDIA Introduces New Low-Latency Vulkan Extension For Gaming
Vulkan 1.3.266 was published a few days ago with a handful of fixes and two new extensions. One of those extensions, VK_NV_low_latency2 is quite interesting.
What do you hope to see from NVIDIA in 2024 for Linux/open-source? Let us know in the forums.
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