NVIDIA is open-sourcing their GPU drivers, but there are a few things you need to know. Plus, we get some exclusive insights into Tailscale from one of its co-founders.
Special Guests: Avery Pennarun and Christian F.K. Schaller.
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After losing contact with its helicopter, NASA put the entire Mars mission on hold ) — Mars is only going to get colder and darker for the next 10 weeks as winter deepens.
Why the open source driver release from NVIDIA is so important for Linux?) — Today NVIDIA announced that they are releasing an open source kernel driver for their GPUs, so I want to share with you some background information and how I think this will impact Linux graphics and compute going forward.
NVIDIA Releases Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules) — NVIDIA is now publishing Linux GPU kernel modules as open source with dual GPL/MIT license, starting with the R515 driver release.
Hector Martin on Twitter) — So NVIDIA "released" their kernel driver as open source.
By which they mean, they moved most of it to firmware and made the open source driver call into it. There are almost 900 functions implemented in the 34MB firmware, give or take, from what I can see.
Broadcom vibes...
(If you see the elf sections, there’s ones for Turing, Ampere DC, Ampere customer and Gnext)