NVIDIA’s RTX 30 “Ampere” launch was quite a success for 2020, along with new Jetson products and more. Meanwhile, NVIDIA’s own driver on the Linux front continued to provide same-day support, features similar to Windows, and so far little breadcrumbs of open source support. But there are still indications of more possible open source action, as well as possible better Wayland support to look forward to in 2021.
Unfortunately, there was no major NVIDIA open source announcement for 2020, as was originally a pre-pandemic for the announcement of some kind at GTC. But it looks like something else is brewing and will hopefully not learn too far in 2021 what parts of the driver stack NVIDIA could possibly open. Meanwhile, Nouveau driver support this year saw initial Turing GPU support, but it’s still paralyzed like all GPUs since the GTX 900 series, as they could not reliably reclock the reliable clock frequencies.
Meanwhile, they are working with NVIDIA manager Wayland to support DMA-BUF that enables better integration of Wayland composers.
As for the most popular NVIDIA Linux stories on Phoronix for 2020 (just the news items, without counting reviews / standard articles), it contains:
There is finally open source accelerated NVIDIA Turing graphics support
Here’s another great feature for Linux 5.6: the Nouveau driver has initial accelerated support for NVIDIA “Turing” GPUs! It was eventually set up with NVIDIA to release the Turing firmware images needed for hardware initialization.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3000 Series Introduces Impressive Specifications, Competitive Prices
As is widely expected amid a steady stream of rumors and leaks in recent weeks, NVIDIA has just unveiled their GeForce RTX 3000 “Ampere” range.
NVIDIA contributes much less to the Linux kernel than Intel or AMD
Yesterday I compiled some statistics on the AMD and Intel contributions to the upstream Linux kernel during the 2010s, but a request that came after this was how NVIDIA’s contributions compare. Here’s a look at NVIDIA’s contributions to the Linux kernel over the past decade.
Linux 5.9 provides protection after NVIDIA’s recent “GPL Condom” incident
Due to recent discussions about NVIDIA NetGPU code relying on a different template for the interface between NVIDIA’s own driver and the open source kernel code, a new patch is on the way for Linux 5.9 to fight back against such attempts .
ASUS launches graphics card that could be ideal for open source NVIDIA fans
ASUS has released a new budget graphics card that can actually be great for those who want to use the open source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver on Linux.
Core developers work to block NVIDIA’s “GPL condom” attempt around new NetGPU code
Linux kernel developers are working to sharpen access to kernel symbols and kernel shims that link only to their own kernel modules. This latest work is driven by code recently offered to improve the Linux network code, where NVIDIA’s own core driver would be the initial consumer.
An early benchmark for NVIDIA CUDA GPU performance on WSL2
Our recent benchmarks have shown that WSL / WSL2 performance on the latest Windows 10 builds is generally quite good compared to Linux bare metal. But after the May 2020 update and on the latest Insider Preview builds, the initial support for GPU acceleration is combined with updated Windows graphics drivers. The first emphasis is on GPU computing with DirectML and also for NVIDIA hardware CUDA support. Here are some CUDA benchmarks that have performed gracefully under WSL2, though the performance leaves much to be desired.
NVIDIA Firmware Required for Open Source GeForce 16 Series Acceleration
As written last week, this spring is open source NVIDIA “Nouveau” acceleration for the GeForce 16 series for the Linux 5.7 core. The code is currently sitting in the Nouveau development tree until it ends up in DRM-Next for Linux 5.7, but NVIDIA has now posted the necessary firmware binaries to enable the hardware acceleration on these Turing GPUs.
NVIDIA does not expect Linux 5.9 driver support for another month
While NVIDIA is usually very new to supporting new versions of the Linux kernel and strives to end a driver at the end of the release series for new series, in the case of the recently beaten Linux 5.9 kernel it takes a lot longer.
Blender 2.82’s NVIDIA OptiX support performs very well
Continuing our Blender 2.82 benchmark for this open-source 3D modeling software update launched last month with numerous enhancements, here are some new benchmarks from the CUDA and OptiX backwards for NVIDIA GPU acceleration.
Some nasty code could make NVIDIA’s Linux driver work with accelerated XWayland
Adam Jackson of Red Hat worked on ‘GLX Delay’ as a way to offer Accelerated GLX with OpenGL for XWayland during NVIDIA Manager. The proposed code goes through Mesa, although it is in favor of the NVIDIA driver, and it also needs a change in the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library (libglvnd).
NVIDIA demonstrates the transfer of DirectX radiation to Vulkan
Great “open-source” performance is not very common for NVIDIA or Microsoft much less together, but thanks to their open source work on the DXC DirectXCompiler it is possible to easily convert HLSL DXR shaders to SPIR-V for Vulkan.
Open Source NVIDIA “Nouveau” Driver Must Travel Less Frequently on Some Linux 5.7 GPUs
Last week there were a bunch of new enhancements and features for the open source kernel graphics / display drivers put together for Linux 5.7. There were no feature changes to the open source NVIDIA “Nouveau” driver, but this week there are at least a few solutions / solutions, so it’s less difficult for some hardware.
Valve’s ACO helps Radeon RX 5600 XT compete with NVIDIA’s RTX 2060
As shown yesterday, the new video BIOS of the Radeon RX 5600 XT, coupled with the corrected SMC firmware on Linux, delivers impressive performance improvements that make the card, similar to Windows, better compete with NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 2060. For Linux users becoming the valve-funded ACO compiler back for the Radeon “RADV” Volcano driver helps the competition even more.
Nouveau version CRC support enhanced by NVIDIA documentation
While we waited to see the new open source version of NVIDIA and finally how the reclock situation for Nouveau will be addressed, so that modern GeForce GPUs can work at their intended frequencies on this open-source Linux graphics driver stack, the screen support at least to get into a more reliable state with CRC support on the horizon due to the already published documentation from NVIDIA.
Nsight Graphics 2020.1 released with profiling for Vulkan + OpenGL Interop
NVIDIA on Thursday unveiled Nsight Graphics 2020.1 which can now handle its profiling support OpenGL + Vulkan interoperability for games / applications using both APIs. Although not many game engines / apps like OpenGL 4.6 ARB_gl_spirv are used yet, Nsight is ready.
NVIDIA 440.66.09 Vulcan Driver Beta for Linux brings more fixes
NVIDIA today released new beta reports from their Vulcan drivers for Linux and Windows.
Blender 2.82 performance with the NVIDIA Quadro RTX 5000 laptop performance
For those who want to work on the Blender 3D modeling from a laptop, an NVIDIA RTX graphics processor can do wonders with the OptiX back cover to dramatically speed up the delivery time. Here’s a look at how the different backs compare when using the HP ZBook 17 G6 mobile workstation with Quadro RTX 5000 graphics.
NVIDIA 440.82 Linux Driver brings DOOM Eternal Performance Fix, Linux 5.6 Compatibility
NVIDIA today introduced the 440.82 Linux binary display driver as their latest stable update in the current 440 driver range.
GNOME Shell 3.35.3 released with NVIDIA drivers download, Shell + Nut repair
GNOME Shell 3.35.3 and Nut 3.35.3 were released today as part of the next development step on the road to GNOME 3.36 which will be released in March.