Two new drivers for certain Nvidia GPUs are a promising, though indirect, result of the GPU maker’s open-saucy efforts.
Recently, two new open-source drivers for some Nvidia GPUs have been released. The first is for Haiku OS and the second is a brand new FOSS Nvidia Driver for Linux. The first is a huge deal for this experimental open source re-implementation BeOS, a niche project that has very little support in terms of device drivers from hardware vendors. The other is not as important, especially since Nvidia already produces its own Linux drivers. It does offer a smaller and simpler all-FOSS replacement for the older Nouveau driver.
It’s interesting that the Haiku driver uses some code from Nvidia 2022 FOSS driverin addition to how both benefit. The GPU-maker released the source code of its Linux kernel modules under the permissive MIT licenceback then.
It is important to note that these drivers are only available for certain recent models of Nvidia’s graphics chip. These are the Turing family GPUs which have been around since 2018. This is a general term for the GTX 16XX and RTX 20XX models. Both drivers do not support older Nvidia graphics cards, so they are of no help to those of us still struggling with Nvidia’s legacy Linux drivers. Their existence is still a sign that Jolly Green Giant’s open source initiative for 2022 is beginning to bear fruit…or at least, has resulted in early flowers that may soon become something worth eating. The older of the two drivers
is X512’s early, experimental Haiku Kernel Nvidia driver (19459046). “X512” was the same intrepid Haiku Hacker who a few year ago was also responsible the Haiku Port of WINE. They call their driver NVRM (). NVRM, on its own, is not a complete graphics drivers, but it is partially based upon that Nvidia release.
It’s interesting that the way Haiku works is related to the recent announcement by UK open source coders collective Collabora. They recently announced another FOSS NVIDIA Driver called Zink. Zink was announced in 2018. Zink provides hardware acceleration of OpenGL through a translation layer that converts OpenGL calls into the more modern 3D API Vulkan. Zink is a FOSS that works with an Nvidia driver, NVK, which provides Vulkan on Nvidia Turing GPUs.
NVK was developed by the same company as Zink. Collabora announced the driver in late 2022.As explained in that announcement, the development of NVK was facilitated because the source code for Nvidia’s GPUs is publicly readable. NVK, like the Nouveau driver, is a free and open source driver for Nvidia GPUs. NVK is a part of Mesa 3D libraries (). Mesa3D is a little more difficult to explain
. Its own documentationstates that it is “an open-source implementation of the OpenGL specification”. It’s true but it’s underplayed. Mesa implements Vulkan today, a cross platform hardware-independent APUfor 3D graphics. Vulkan doesn’t just work on Linux: it works on Windows, macOS and Android. Mesa, a cross-platform implementation of OpenGL and Vulkan for multiple OSes, is not just for Linux. Mesa can communicate with GPUs from multiple vendors. Mesa3D, for example, provides an OpenGL interface for DirectX on Windows, a platform where GPU vendors are very careful to have drivers that support Microsoft APIs like DirectX. Mesa is a key component of the Linux and FreeBSD graphic driver stack. Most FOSS 3D drivers also use Mesa, aside from Nvidia proprietary drivers.
Let’s get back to the new drivers. Collabora put in a lot of effort to build NVK . NVK is a driver that communicates with Nvidia Turing graphics cards and provides a Vulkan-based interface. Zinkthen talks to NVK to provide OpenGL.
Youtube Video.
We find that X512 has managed to wire up Mesa’s NVK Vulkan implementation to their new NVRM Driver. The result is an initial Nvidia driver, but at the moment it only supports Vulkan instead of the older and more popular OpenGL.
Although Haiku, as an open-source recreation of the original BeOS, has always had snazzy video and 3D graphics, the lack of drivers means that they are rendered using software– although, according to the discussion thread, in 2023, there were several drivers under construction. Linus Torvalds forgot about Linux 6.14 in 2023
- Nvidia’s next Linux driver will be… just as open.
- EU OS drafts a closed-down Linux blueprint designed for Eurocrats.
- Asahi Linux has lost another prominent developer as GPU guru quits.
A famous BeOS demo was a program which displayed 3D rendered objects such as a 3D cube that you The user could drag and drop different image files on the surface of the 3D object, then play around with it. The images were smoothly mapped to 3D. It’s at about 12 minutes in the YouTube video. Haiku has a similar app for this. It’s hard to describe how impressive this was back in 1998 before Nvidia released the Riva TNT2 in early 1999. For readers who were not around in 1998, this is the GPU that was released before the GeForce 256, the first GPU mass-market with hardware transform and illumination . The BeOS demo was released just two years after id’s release of Quake. Most of us played it at 320×200. If you had a fast PC, it could run up to 30 frames per second. This demo with full-motion video on a 3D Surface was literally breathtaking.
Everything was done in software. It’s exciting to think about what this OS could do if it had access to modern display hardware. It’s also good to have another Linux option that is all-FOSS. (r)
