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NVK enabled for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs
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this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
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Thanks for such a detailed explanations. That's what I meant, I would love to avoid official drivers headache that causes you to avoid recommend Nvidia. Still there are some things that you cannot avoid it. Things I have in mind are better than AMD / Intel GPU with Mesa:
for the encoding and decoding I would choose Intel. For gaming AMD as I'm currently right now with Bazzite.
At least the situation will get better.
Nouveau's kernel driver is a horrible mess, so I'm looking forward to Nova, if it ever gets ready.
For older (pre-about-RTX 2000-series) cards, the kernel driver had to do a lot, and Nouveau had to reverse engineer most things. Now, Nvidia has moved most of the proprietary magic into something called the GSP (GPU System Processor), which is a small processor (RISC-V, IIRC) which does many things the kernel driver did previously, like reclocking. This, in addition to the official open kernel drivers should make developing a new FOSS Nvidia driver a lot easier. RedHat's Nova (and I think Nvidia's open driver) only support cards with a GSP for this reason.
NVK is very impressive for such a new unofficia Nvidia driver in my opinion. If I remember correctly, they said that they'll focus more on optimization now that it's conformant.
When/if Nova is ready, it will finally be possible to use a Rust graphics driver stack on Linux outside of Asahi.
If you have any questions remaining, just ask.
Edit: So the closed source GSP firmware blob has 3 "good" points:
The HDMI Forum decided some time ago that HDMI was too open. Now, for the newer versions, the license doesn't allow open source implementations. Nvidia gets around this with proprietary GSP firmware inside the GPU (even with official open source drivers, not sure about Nouveau) and Intel with GPU firmware or an internal adapter, depending on the GPU (if I've understood correctly). Only AMD doesn't support the newest HDMI version.
Yeah I'm waiting for the RedHat's Nova too to see it in action. This GSP doesn't seem that bad tbh and I don't think it's the source of our headaches. But it looks like the future is bright for Nvidia driver Linux stack.
So NVK is succesor of Noveau while Nova being a new open source driver?
Nova is still in the very early stages of development, though I think they've laid down a lot of the groundwork now? They recently got the driver to do one part of the GPU initalization process, so work on the driver proper has started.
In the strictest sense, NVK is not a replacement for Nouveau's OpenGL driver, but Zink on NVK is, as NVK is exclusively a Vulkan driver and Nouveau has no support for Vulkan.