The launch of NVIDIA’s RTX 30 “Ampere” was a huge success in 2020, along with new Jetson products and more. Meanwhile, in front of Linux this year, NVIDIA’s proprietary driver continued to provide same-day support, features virtually on par with Windows and few crumbs of open source support so far. But there are still indications of more possible open source actions to come, as well as potentially better support for Wayland to wait in 2021.
Unfortunately, there were no major open source announcements by NVIDIA for 2020, as the pre-pandemic was originally scheduled for some type of announcement to take place in the GTC. But it looks like something is still forming and hopefully we’ll learn more not far in 2021 about what parts of the NVIDIA driver stack may potentially be opening up. Meanwhile, Nouveau driver support saw initial support for the Turing GPU this year, but it is still crippled like all GPUs since the GTX 900 series for not being able to reliably re-clock to achieve nominal clock frequencies.
Meanwhile, on NVIDIA’s Wayland driver, they are working on the DMA-BUF pass-through support that will allow for better integration of the Wayland composer.
As for the most popular stories from NVIDIA Linux on Phoronix for 2020 (only news items, not to mention the reference reviews / reference articles), they include:
Finally, open source NVIDIA Turing graphics is supported
Here’s another great feature that comes with Linux 5.6: the Nouveau driver will have accelerated initial support for NVIDIA “Turing” GPUs! This is coming to an end, with NVIDIA configured to publicly release the Turing firmware images needed for hardware initialization.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3000 Series launches with impressive specs and competitive prices
As widely expected amid a steady stream of rumors and leaks in recent weeks, NVIDIA has just unveiled its GeForce RTX 3000 series “Ampere”.
NVIDIA contributes much less to the Linux kernel than Intel or AMD
Yesterday I gathered some statistics on the contributions of AMD vs. Intel for the upstream Linux kernel during the 2010s, but one request coming was how NVIDIA’s contributions compare. Here is a look at NVIDIA’s contributions to the Linux kernel over the past decade.
Linux 5.9 brings protection after recent NVIDIA “GPL condom” incident
As a result of recent discussions about the NVIDIA NetGPU code that relied on another shim for the interface between the proprietary NVIDIA driver and the open source kernel code, a new patch is on its way for Linux 5.9 to fight against such efforts.
ASUS launches video card that can really be great for open source NVIDIA fans
ASUS has launched a new economical graphics card that can really be great for those who want to use the NVIDIA (Nouveau) open source driver stack on Linux.
Kernel developers work to block NVIDIA’s “GPL condom” effort around new NetGPU code
Linux kernel developers are working to restrict access around GPL-only kernel symbols and kernel shims that interface with proprietary kernel modules. This latest work is being driven by code recently released to improve Linux network code, where the proprietary NVIDIA kernel driver would be the initial consumer.
An initial comparison of the performance of the NVIDIA CUDA GPU in WSL2
Our recent benchmarks have shown that the WSL / WSL2 performance in the latest builds of Windows 10 is generally very good compared to running bare metal Linux. But after the May 2020 update and the latest Insider Preview builds, there is initial support for GPU acceleration in conjunction with updated Windows graphics drivers. The initial emphasis is on GPU computing with DirectML and also on CUDA support for NVIDIA hardware. Here are some CUDA benchmarks that ran smoothly in WSL2, although performance leaves much to be desired.
NVIDIA posts necessary firmware for open source acceleration GeForce 16 Series
As written last week, in progress for the Linux 5.7 kernel this spring is NVIDIA’s open source “Nouveau” acceleration for the GeForce 16 series. This code is currently in the Nouveau development tree until it reaches DRM-Next for Linux 5.7, but NVIDIA has already posted the necessary firmware binaries to enable hardware acceleration on these Turing GPUs.
NVIDIA does not expect support for Linux 5.9 driver for another month
Although NVIDIA is generally quite timely in supporting new versions of the Linux kernel and intends to have a driver by the end of the release candidates for the new series, in the case of the newly created Linux 5.9 kernel it is taking much longer.
Blender 2.82’s NVIDIA OptiX support is working great
Continuing with our Blender 2.82 benchmarking for this open source 3D modeling software update that debuted last month with numerous improvements, here are some new benchmarks for the CUDA and OptiX backends for NVIDIA GPU acceleration.
Some ugly code can make the NVIDIA Linux driver work with XWayland accelerated
Red Hat’s Adam Jackson has been working on the “GLX Delay” as a means of offering accelerated GLX with OpenGL for XWayland when using NVIDIA’s proprietary driver. The proposed code is passing through Mesa, although it is for the benefit of the proprietary NVIDIA driver and also requires a change to the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library (libglvnd).
NVIDIA Demonstrates Transfer of DirectX Ray-Tracing to Vulkan
Major “open source” achievements are not very common for NVIDIA or Microsoft, let alone together, but thanks to their open source work on DXC DirectXCompiler, it is possible to easily convert HLSL DXR shaders into SPIR-V for Vulkan.
The open source NVIDIA “Nouveau” driver should disarm less frequently on some GPUs with Linux 5.7
Last week, there were a number of new improvements and features for the open source kernel video / graphics drivers merged for Linux 5.7. There has been no feature change in the open-source NVIDIA “Nouveau” driver while this week, at least, there are some fixes / workarounds to make it less problematic for some hardware.
Valve’s ACO helps Radeon RX 5600 XT compete with NVIDIA’s RTX 2060
As shown yesterday, the new Radeon RX 5600 XT video BIOS paired with the corrected SMC firmware on Linux produces impressive performance improvements that – similar to Windows – allow the card to compete better with NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 2060. For Linux users, enabling the Valve-funded ACO compiler backend for the Vulkan Radeon “RADV” driver helps to further increase competition.
Nouveau Display CRC support being signed thanks to NVIDIA documentation
While we wait to see NVIDIA’s new open source and finally how the re-clocking situation will be resolved for Nouveau so that modern GeForce GPUs can work at their intended frequencies in this open source Linux graphics driver stack, at least the display support was getting into a more reliable state with CRC support on the horizon as a result of the already published NVIDIA documentation.
Nsight Graphics 2020.1 released with profiling for Vulkan + OpenGL Interop
NVIDIA unveiled Nsight Graphics 2020.1 on Thursday which, with profiling support, can now handle OpenGL + Vulkan interoperability for games / applications that use both APIs. Although few game / application engines are still using OpenGL 4.6 ARB_gl_spirv, Nsight is ready.
NVIDIA 440.66.09 Vulkan Driver Beta for Linux brings more fixes
NVIDIA today released new beta builds of its Vulkan drivers for Linux and Windows.
Blender 2.82 performance with NVIDIA Quadro RTX 5000 laptop performance
For those looking to work on 3D modeling of a laptop’s Blender, having an NVIDIA RTX graphics processor can do wonders with the OptiX backend to dramatically speed up rendering times. Here is a look at how the different backends compare when running the HP ZBook 17 G6 mobile workstation with Quadro RTX 5000 video card.
NVIDIA 440.82 Linux driver brings Eternal DOOM performance fix, compatibility with Linux 5.6
NVIDIA today released the Linux binary video driver 440.82 as its latest stable update in the current 440 driver series.
GNOME Shell 3.35.3 released with NVIDIA driver download, fixes for Shell + Mutter
GNOME Shell 3.35.3 and Mutter 3.35.3 were released today as part of the next development stage on the road to GNOME 3.36 which will be released in March.