this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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I used to buy Nvidia cards, but since AMD providing support for teams building in-kernel drivers I've mostly walked away from team green.
Unfortunately when it comes to stuff like laptops the selection with AMD kit is a bit limited, do I do have one with an NVidia card there and it's still a huge pain. In Linux I have to worry about the driver stub borking every time there's a kernel update, and in Windows they seem to want you to login to their app to do damned updates.
I'm happy to see Nouveau getting better accelerated support but it would be even nicer if NVidia could step up to the plate themselves.
Tbh all nVidia should've done was to make their firmware available and easily redistributable. Them locking down their hardware down to the firmware level is what killed the development of Nouveau.
They don't need to step up to the plate, just don't block the guys who are willing to do the necessary work themselves
Didn't they recently unblock that around the time they released their open kernel module?
Yes, but that license change took them quite a while after the first release of the open kernel module, and still, that's only for the GSP firmware. Nothing of the sort is the case for the PMU firmware that could be used for Maxwell and Pascal*.
(*Fun fact, there is actually some code for power management for Maxwell series at least (not upstreamed I presume), Nouveau devs even demonstrated NVK via playing Hollow Knight on a GTX950m, which ran the game pretty smoothly, the main issue seems to be not being able to control the fans of the GPU due to the firmware, something that was not really a problem for the particular laptop they've done the demonstration on)
Edit: My bad, it was a GTX980m instead: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@gfxstrand/110311684373260454
You mean ones with dedicated cards? Their APU selection is actually pretty nice these days. I am digging my Ryzen 6800U.
DKMS is your friend. I've never once had it break and I run Arch where the kernel updates practically every week.
Yeah the APU availability isn't bad (and I'd choose AMD for an APU over others) but selection with dedicated graphics chips is pretty limited, especially if you're looking for both an dedicated AMD GPU and CPU.
I have definitely had DKMS not play nicely with my Nvidia drivers, as well as the "which Nvidia driver actually supports this older GPU... oh look it's dropped" issue, but that's also on Ubuntu variants so you might have better luck in arch.
To be fair, I do some weird shit on my environments. One thing I'd love if NVidia had reasonably supported native drivers is to have a PXE-boot system that plays nicely regardless of whether one is one is team green or team red. I used to maintain one which contained a decent catalog of games but had to do some quirky overlayfs stuff to make both viable.
In a way, I think it's also best if the community would work this driver out, because if Nvidia steps in and gets involved in this project, chances are that they might update their Linux kernel driver to become incompatible with Nouveau/NVK.
Would that necessarily be bad. If they made a proper open-source Nvidia driver - similar to the in-kernel AMDGPU - then Nouveau could still build off that or be merged in to add functionality.
I don't miss the old fglrx drivers now that AMDGPU is around.
Definitely would not mind having an AMDGPU equivalent for Nvidia. It'd be awesome if things like proprietary CUDA could be an optional installable package alongside an open graphics driver.