Hell has frozen over?
I think this is mostly just practical. Tainted kernels are more problematic for a variety of reasons these days (thinking about things like TPMs), so moving that stuff out of the kernel lets NVIDIA keep their proprietary drivers without sacrificing certain use cases.
I’m more interested in seeing NVIDIA hardware usable with mesa, which would be a much longer term project.
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What am I supposed to do with my picture of Linus flipping the bird?
Based on this article and the linked one it looks like the ex Nouveau maintainer Ben Skeggs (single-handedly?) fixes Nvidia Linux support?! A truly heroic deed of true.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
NVIDIA have announced some big changes are coming to their Linux drivers, which will start with the upcoming 560 series.
Starting in the release 560 series, it will be recommended to use the open flavor of NVIDIA Linux Kernel Modules wherever possible (Turing or later GPUs, or Ada or later when using GPU virtualization).
Distribution-specific repackaging of the NVIDIA driver may require additional steps, specific to that packaging, to choose the open flavor.
In the release 560 series, it will still be possible to configure the .run file to install the proprietary flavor of kernel modules, with the --kernel-module-type=proprietary command line option.
We still have the 555 Beta to come this month which will bring Explicit Sync support.
We’ve seen recently how the former Nouveau driver lead joined NVIDIA and sent a massive patch set, and then we had news that an NVIDIA developer contributed to the open source NVK driver and even on top of that they put up a script for GeForce NOW on Steam Deck.
The original article contains 256 words, the summary contains 168 words. Saved 34%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
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This will be excellent if each BSD operating system can build and compile their own nVidia drivers from source.
Kernel modules aren’t the same as drivers. They’re an interface for drivers.
They service the same purpose as a driver, and FreeBSD has user added kernel modules, I forget if OpenBSD does but I’m hoping so.
