1mo ago

The New Rust-Written NVIDIA "NOVA" Driver Submitted Ahead Of Linux 6.15

www.phoronix.com

Attention Required! | Cloudflare

GNU/Linux Gaming on Reddit @lemmit.online

1mo ago

First pull request for NOVA submitted ahead of Linux 6.15, to provide a skeleton for this open source kernel driver written in Rust for Nvidia GTX 1600 and later GPUs

www.phoronix.com /news/NOVA-Driver-For-Linux-6.15

37 comments

Somewhere, somebody's having a meltdown because Rust is spreading more and more in the kernel.
Good to see that NVIDIA is writing opensource drivers (or starting to). I guess it's too much to ask to support old graphics cards, with NVIDIA mostly caring about money and a linux driver being an incentive to choose NVIDIA over AMD for some.
Anti Commercial-AI license
- Somewhere, somebody’s having a meltdown because Rust is spreading more and more in the kernel.
  Probably more than just one somebody, based on the drama in these last few week's. 😜
  Good to see that NVIDIA is writing opensource drivers (or starting to). I guess it’s too much to ask to support old graphics cards, with NVIDIA mostly caring about money and a linux driver being an incentive to choose NVIDIA over AMD for some.
  It's too bad that there's still a proprietary binary layer that this driver will talk to. (I'm assuming right/wrong that it's not open source, since it's binary.)
  Best to support AMD if you game on Linux. Really wish Intel would step up their GPU game.
  _This _comment _is _licensed _under _CC _BY-NC-SA _4.0
  
  I've bought two AMD GPUs in the last two years but I still have three Nvidia GPUs that I use. The cost of moving everything over to AMD is high so it just takes time to get rid of old hardware as a best case scenario.
  
  It’s too bad that there’s still a proprietary binary layer that this driver will talk to. (I’m assuming right/wrong that it’s not open source, since it’s binary.)
  I must've missed that from in the post. Do you have more information on that?
  Anti Commercial-AI license
  
  Isnt the battlemage GPU lineup supposed to be good?
- It looks like this driver was written by folks at Red Hat, not NVIDIA.
- I genuinely don't get the hate on Rust. Is it just people scared they'll be out of a job after spending all their time learning and using an older language?
  
  Yes.

Phoronix comments continue to be demented
- Wow, you weren't kidding. Full-on death threats and nazi talking points... over a graphics driver.

Sounds promising
- Does it?
  I mean, the goal here should be transparent setup, full feature support across all applications and very quick updates to official driver parity. My bar for "promising" may be in a different place.
  
  I don't think an open source driver will ever fully catch up to the proprietary ones in this case, but for people who want to use only open drivers if it eventually gets somewhat close that might be enough.

INB4: The rust maintainer for Nvidia "NOVA" Driver has ceased development and left his position vacant because of harassment from C++ devs.
I wonder if this project is more shielded (from douchebags) than other affected projects like Asahi and the like.

Hmm I hope the chosen language doesn't cause performance issues.
- Well, it shouldn't. Both C and Rust can achieve the same performance. There's also no overhead for calling Rust from C or vice versa. Theoretically, some detail-optimizations look less horrid in C, but on the other hand, writing parallel code is significantly easier in Rust. Graphics drivers tend to be all about parallelism, although I can't say how relevant it actually is in this case.
  Having said that, it is likely that the initial versions of this new driver will have worse performance, until the code base matures more.
- Was this a general conservative outlook/take on change?
  Or are you hinting at something? If so, would you be so kind to elaborate?
  
  No it wasn't a hint on anything specific. I'm just rather skeptical when it comes to any major changes made to anything in recent times.
- Rust can be faster or slower depending on how you write your C code. In general they are the same.

37 comments