Linux: Nvidia publishes graphics card drivers on Github – News

Nvidia has taken a first step for its Linux graphics card customers by opening its drivers to open source and development. The driver was based on an MIT license github published for everyone to see and reuse.

This step allows the GPU modules and GPU drivers to be further developed by the open source community and improved together with Nvidia. However, the proprietary part of the graphics card driver, the so-called “user space software”, is excluded from this. Nvidia announced:

This release is a significant step that improves the experience of Nvidia graphics cards on Linux. It will better integrate the driver into the operating system and allow developers to debug it, integrate it and contribute to development.

For Linux distribution providers, the open source module makes it easy to use.

They also improve the user experience without any necessary adjustments to sign and distribute the Nvdia GPU driver. Canonical and SUSE are immediately able to build the open kernel modules with Ubuntu and SUSE Linux Enterprise distributions.

This step only applies to the Nvidia graphics cards of the chip series Turing (RTX 2000 series) and Ampere (RTX 3000 series), older graphics cards have not benefited so far. However, this driver is currently in an early version, which should not be considered mature, but has so far been classified as “alpha”. The open source driver continues to work with the programming interfaces (CUDA, OpenGL, OpenCL and Vulkan) as well as Nvidia’s own firmware and libraries.

However, developers wishing to contribute patches and changes must agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA). CLAs are industry-standard terms designed to avoid license conflicts in which the programmer assigns ownership of the submitted code to the owner (here Nvidia), for example Google or the Apache Software Foundation use such agreements.