The "Nova" driver for NVIDIA chipsets

I'm puzzled by lwn users calling the 'open source' nvidia wrapper a driver, which as far as I know is not called a driver by anyone. There were several good lwn discussions on this, and I think even the core projects didn't pretend the wrapper is a driver. What actually happened, which is why you see the 'turing' cutoff point, is that nvidia moved most of the existing driver into firmware blobs in the gpu, and then created the sort of interface to that blob in a free _driver_. This was if I remember right because AMD and Intel are entering, or have entered, the highly profitable datacenter gpu market, with free drivers in the kernel, and ibm-redhat among others wanted to be able to ship ready for use kernels to those datacenter systems, thus, the wrapper, which is open source.

While there was some talk, which to me was somewhat delusional, about this wrapper layer being extended to pre-turing hardware, that makes no sense since the firmware blob has to be in the hardware for the open wrapper layer to work. I don't think even nvidia calls this is a driver, so not sure why lwn people are doing that.

I followed this fairly intensively because it mattered for a project I do, though I don't have links for the key threads and nvidia and kernel discussions.

So what we get is a huge non free blob being moved into firmware on the gpu, then a wrapper t6hat talks to that blob, which is of course why thinks like nova cut it at turing, it's a completely different ballgame from making an actual full free driver like nouveau, and in that sense, the project makes a lot of sense, sort of, though it could just be one of those: can we do this in rust? ok, let's do it! things.

I stopped following this about 1 year ago though, when it became apparent that nvidia was WAY behind delivering the first consumer/work station 'open' driver, and they still have not done the new legacy branch that would indicate the actual open wrapper is fully operational for consumer / 3d rendering purposes. To me based on their initial statements in this project, it looks like they are at least 1 year behind schedule, so they must have hit some bumps they were not expecting.

I also don't know if they plan on continuing to ship a non free blob once the open (but not free in any real sense) interface code is working for complex consumer gpu situations.

But I can see a real utility to just dumping the pre turing support and starting fresh, when I tried switching to nouveau on older nvidia hardware, it simply didn't work in any way that was realistic for production, so I gave up and switched to used older amd radeon cards, and have been happy ever since. So nouveau is not a solved problem by any means, I can see wanting to try it again with a simplified approach, maybe with better results, but I am puzzled about the actual utility, it may be that the open wrapper layer is missing key features that the full non free driver has, I really can't say and don't know, and since switching to amd and free drivers, I stopped caring, having tracked this stuff for far too long for various projects I've run, so I'm pretty much over nvidia now, and don't miss it at all, free kernel drivers are just so radically nicer, and since I don't game, I truly don't care.

But maybe i will poke back into this, I'm sure phoronix has been covering it, to see where the stuff actually is now.

I for one added support for nova, and thinks it's a good idea if it gets a working patch that the kernel accepts, which has not happened as of now from what I understand. I'm guessing there are nonfree bits of the nonfree driver which will not be covered by the free wrapper, which is almost exclusively focused on redhat/canonical etc being able to deliver out of the box working nvidia gpu systems to datacenters.

That support was, by the way, working I think 2 years ago now, basically it was done almost immediately, since the real market for this is the gpu datacenter market, not the 0.x percent of desktop users who run Linux kernel and nvidia hardware (based on latest estimates of 3% desktop, much of which is intel/amd driven for gpus).