Native NVIDIA support for AlmaLinux OS 9 and 10

[Posted August 6, 2025 by jzb]

The AlmaLinux project has announced the availability of packages to enable native NVIDIA driver support, including CUDA and Secure Boot, for AlmaLinux 9 and 10.

When AlmaLinux started just 5 years ago, this wouldn't have been possible. With NVIDIA's open source version of their graphics drivers things have changed. This open source version is slowly becoming the flagship driver, with new products being added exclusively to it. With the help of some incredible people in the open source ecosystem and the AlmaLinux community, we were able to do something that has yet to be done in the EL ecosystem - ship Secure Boot signed, open source, NVIDIA kernel modules.

Full documentation is available on the AlmaLinux wiki.

Open Source?

Posted Aug 7, 2025 5:31 UTC (Thu) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link] (4 responses)

"Open Source" still means the kernel driver is under a free license, but is talking to a proprietary user-space blob?

Or has that changed too?

Open Source?

Posted Aug 7, 2025 7:08 UTC (Thu) by simlo (guest, #10866) [Link] (1 responses)

One must hope that at least will help on the stability issues I had when I used NVIDIA/Cuda on a Thinkpad in my last job in Ubuntu 22.04: Cuda locked up, sometimes the whole machine and suspend/resume often stopped with a nvidia related message. If the proprietary space driver can be isolated enough (and is restartable), it can at least avoid crashing the machine, although it would crash my desktop, unless I run that on the low power Intel GPU often also present.

Open Source?

Posted Aug 10, 2025 17:49 UTC (Sun) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link]

Thanks, I thought it was just me.. running a System76 system that I bought with nvidia specifically to play around with PhysX. Ended up disabling it for daily use, and flipping it back on when needed.

Support mentioned a complicated reset process that supposedly helps with suspend/resume, but I didn't have a big enough free time block. Someday...

Open Source?

Posted Aug 7, 2025 13:01 UTC (Thu) by jonathanspw (subscriber, #154835) [Link]

Correct. We are building the open source GPU driver so that we can ship it with secure boot.

The user space and CUDA bits come from NVIDIA repos directly and have a mixed bag of licenses.

Open Source?

Posted Aug 7, 2025 13:49 UTC (Thu) by cypherpunks2 (guest, #152408) [Link]

Much of the user-space code is proprietary and closed and always has been (libnvidia-ml, libcuda, libcudart, etc). There are no signs that Nvidia will be willing to even consider opening those.

The open source kernel module has most of the same code that the proprietary module has, except some components that manage and control low-level GPU behavior. Nvidia has moved that low-level management code to a binary blob that is loaded onto the GPU itself and run on a RISC-V management co-processor called the GSP. Along with another co-processor called the FSP, it performs similar functionality to the Intel CSME and AMD PSP. By moving the low-level management code out of the drivers, they're able to open up their drivers, and thus ease code maintenance and bug reports, without revealing anything new about the GPU's inner workings.

This is also why the open driver, despite having feature parity with the proprietary one, only lacks the ability to disable the GSP (the register that disables it is just a no-op on the open driver). It's also why there is no open driver for the Kepler architecture, which lacks a GSP in the first place.