[dralley]

I doubt it. It's probably a matter of constantly being prodded by their industry partners (i.e. Red Hat), constantly being shamed by the community, and reducing the amount of maintenance they need to do to keep their driver stack updated and working on new kernels.

The meat of the drivers is still proprietary, this just allows them to be loaded without a proprietary kernel module.

[chillfox]

Nvidia has historically given zero fucks about the opinions of their partners.

So my guess is it's to do with LLMs. They are all in on AI, and having more of their code be part of training sets could make tools like ChatGPT/Claude/Copilot better at generating code for Nvidia GPUs.

[da_chicken]

Yup. nVidia wants those fat compute center checks to keep coming in. It's an unsaturated market, unlike gaming consoles, home gaming PCs, and design/production workstations. They got a taste of that blockchain dollar, and now AI looks to double down on the demand.

The best solution is to have the industry eat their dogfood.

[jmorenoamor]

I also see this as the main reason. GPU drivers for Linux, as far as I know, were just a niche use case, maybe CUDA planted a small seed, and the AI hype is the flower. Now the industry, not the users, demand drivers, so this became a demanded feature instead of a niche user wish.

A bit sad, but hey, welcome anyways.

[p_l]

I suspect it's mainly the reduced maintenance and reduction of workload needed to support, especially with more platforms coming to be supported (not so long ago there was no ARM64 nvidia support, now they are shipping their own ARM64 servers!)

What really changed the situation is that Turing architecture GPUs bring new, more powerful management CPU, which has enough capacity to essentially run the OS-agnostic parts of driver that used to be provided as blob on linux.

[knotimpressed]

Am I correct in reading that as Turing architecture cards include a small CPU on the GPU board, running parts of the driver/other code?

[p_l]

In Turing microarchitecture, nVidia replaced their old "falcon" cpu with NV-RISCV RV64 chip, running various internal tasks.

"Open Drivers" from nVidia include different firmware that utilizes the new-found performance.

[matheusmoreira]

How well isolated is this secondary computer? Do we have reason to fear the proprietary software running on it?

[p_l]

As well isolated as anything else on the bus.

So you better actually use IOMMU

[stragies]

Ah, yes, the magical IOMMU controller, that everybody just assumes to be implemented perfectly across the board. I'm expecting this to be like Hyperthreading, where we find out 20 years later, that the feature was faulty/maybe_bugdoored since inception in many/most/all implementations.

Same thing with USB3/TB-controllers, NPUs, etc that everybody just expects to be perfectly implemented to spec, with flawless firmwares.

[matheusmoreira]

> you better actually use IOMMU

Is this feature commonly present on PC hardware? I've only ever read about it in the context of smartphone security. I've also read that nvidia doesn't like this sort of thing because it allows virtualizing their cards which is supposed to be an "enterprise" feature.

[kabes]

It's hard to believe one of the highest valued companies in the world cares about being shamed for not having open source drivers.

[commodoreboxer]

They care when it affects their bottom line, and customers leaving for the competition does that.

I don't know if that's what's happening here, honestly, but you're right that they don't care about being shamed, but building a reputation of being hard to work with and target, especially in a growing market like Linux (still tiny, but growing nonetheless, and becoming significantly more important in the areas where non-gaming GPU use is concerned) can start to erode sales and B2B relationships, and the latter particularly if you make the programmers and PMs hate using your products.

[gessha]

> customers leaving for the competition does that

What competition?

I do agree that companies don’t really care for public sentiment as long as business is going as usual. Nvidia is printing money with their data center hardware [1] where half of their yearly revenue comes from.

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financia...

[bryanlarsen]

> in a growing market like Linux

Isn't Linux 80% of their market? ML et al is 80% of their sales, and ~99% of that is Linux.

[fngjdflmdflg]

True, although note that the Linux market itself is increasing in size due to ML. Maybe "increasingly dominant market" is a better phrase here.

[bryanlarsen]

Hah, good point. The OP was pedantically correct. The implication in "growing market share" is that "market share" is small, but that's definitely reading between the lines!

[lmm]

Right, and that's where most of their growth is.

[nailer]

Having products that require a bunch of extra work due to proprietary drivers, especially when their competitors don't require that work, is not good.

[josefx]

The biggest chunk of that "extra work" would be installing Linux in the first place, given that almost everything comes with Windows out of the box. An additional "sudo apt install nvidia-drivers" isn't going to stop anyone who already got that far.

[sam_bristow]

Does the "everything comes with Windows out of the box" still apply for the servers and workstations where I imagine the vast majority of these high-end GPUs are going these days?

[Arch-TK]

Tainted kernel. Having to sort out secure boot problems caused by use of an out of tree module. DKMS. Annoying weird issues with different kernel versions and problems running the bleeding edge.

[nailer]

Most cloud instances come with Linux out of the box.

[ZeroCool2u]

I mean I've personally given our Nvidia rep some light hearted shit for it. Told him I'd appreciate if he passed the feedback up the chain. Can't hurt to provide feedback!