10h ago

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

www.phoronix.com The New Rust-Written NVIDIA "NOVA" Driver Submitted Ahead Of Linux 6.15

GNU/Linux Gaming on Reddit @lemmit.online

5h 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

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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.
  
  I guess? Ultimately Nvidia has like 90% plus market share in dedicated GPUs. This needs a very good solution to be acceptable for most potential users.
  I guess for some applications if you get access to hardware acceleration in some form at least it's not a hard blocker, but unless your machine is very strictly dedicated to just a subset of applications who is paying a ton of money for a Nvidia GPU only to use it partially?
  Ah, never mind. I'm just frustrated because I'm part of that 90% and even on the proprietary driver things have been flaky enough to get in my way. I'd still argue that the bar should be set at full usability, not remedial minimum functionality, though.
  
  I think you're absolutely right at the high-end, but if I have a cheaper or older machine (especially laptop) and I'm not going to play AAA games on it anyway, this driver could eventually lead to decent performance with even greater stability than the proprietary ones.
  
  Sure, I guess? But I also feel like the further you go down that list the more stable things are already, especially if you're willing to go shopping for distros that offer specific Nvidia-focused variants.
  I'm also not super clear on what "high end" means in Linux circles, because a bunch of the Nvidia-proprietary features in question have been in place for over half a decade now and are tied to generations, not how expensive the cards are.
  At some point you need to develop the ability to catch up to the proprietary side of things, which means progressing faster than they iterate. I'm not keyed in to day-to-day updates to the point where I can tell if that's the case, but from the stuff that reaches me organically that doesn't seem to be what's happening so far.
  
  Could it though?
  
  I meant in the sense of could possibly, but I don't have a guess on how likely.
  I am extrapolating on the stability thing just based on the language it's coded in, which isn't any kind of guarantee, but I think it is a good sign

21 comments