NVIDIA publishes free (libre) drivers for Ampere and Turing GPUs on Linux

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StefanR5R
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NVIDIA publishes free (libre) drivers for Ampere and Turing GPUs on Linux

Post by StefanR5R »

News from yesterday, but I just saw it:

NVIDIA released driver source code for the Linux kernel, under dual GPL and MIT license, for Ampere and Turing generation GPUs. The current release is supposed to be in production quality for server GPUs and in alpha quality for desktop and workstation GPUs. Usermode software stacks such as CUDA, OpenGL, and Vulkan are supposed to be functional on this driver.

This code is not in a state that could be merged into the mainline Linux kernel source repository. However, there are plans to rework the code for a future merge into upstream. Nevertheless, the free (as in speech) license makes it straightforward for distributors to package this driver. Canonical, Red Hat, and SUSE are partnering with NVIDIA for packaging and development efforts. Additionally, this open source driver may be helpful to the development of the existing mainline driver for NVIDIA GPUs, Nouveau.

There are apparently no plans to extend this driver to GPU architectures older than Turing.

NVIDIA press release:
https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidi ... l-modules/

Phoronix report:
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page= ... rnel&num=1

STH news item:
https://www.servethehome.com/nvidia-ope ... for-linux/
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