NVidia makes your drives more open

Sunday May 15, 2022 at 7:51 pm

On Linux, they open up to third-party developers with a subtle pull.

Regarding nVidia, we mostly report about our graphic consoles and their technical details, for example, we wrote recently about the new generation features, but the state and nature of the software drivers is just as important as that, as we can’t do much with their powerful tools . Now there is news on the latter, which appears to be a positive development.

Report the latest action to the company’s developer side resolutionand the resulting changes. From this we learned that the R515 driver is partially unlocked, as in the dual-licensing model, Linux kernel drivers are now available for all cards released after 2018. With this step, we will be able to take a closer look at the kernels, as they will be able to Better parsing, debugging and integrating them, which is definitely good news for developers of different distributions, since we will be able to research the code and dissipate heat, and repair Nouveau engines further.

With the move, the GTX 1650, 1660, GeForce 20 and 30 Series, A-Series for data centers, Tesla and Quadro RTX will be affected by the change, but that doesn’t mean fully unlocking the drive. This is because modules released through the combination of the GPL and MIT licensing process do not cover the same drive, as much of the code remains hidden from third parties because it was previously ported along with the firmware. The drives will continue to be distributed as precompiled binaries, which means that the source code will not be freely available, so we won’t see any major changes in this area initially.

However, this step is welcome and can greatly improve the optimization and integration of Linux drivers.