The Maintainer Of The NVIDIA Open-Source "Nouveau" Linux Kernel Driver Resigns
The Maintainer Of The NVIDIA Open-Source "Nouveau" Linux Kernel Driver Resigns
Godspeed to him
And also: fuck you, Nvidia!
Poor burnt out guy
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Hours after posting a large patch series for enabling the Nouveau kernel driver to use NVIDIA's GSP for improving the support for RTX 20/30 series hardware and finally enabling accelerated graphics support on RTX 40 "Ada Lovelace" GPUs, the Red Hat maintainer has resigned from his duties.
Throughout all the battles, particularly after the GTX 900 series and later has required signed firmware images for enabling any accelerated GPU support, he's now resigning from maintaining the driver.
This is a personal decision that I've been mulling over for a number of years now, and I feel that with GSP-RM greatly simplifying support of future HW, and the community being built around NVK, that things are in good hands and this is the right time for me to take some time away to explore other avenues.
I still have a personal system with an RTX 4070, which I've been using the nouveau GSP-RM code on for the past couple of weeks, so chances are I'll be poking my nose in every so often :)
It will be very interesting to see how this plays out considering Ben has been the number one contributor to the Nouveau kernel driver for years while at Red Hat.
Stay tuned to Phoronix to see how the open-source NVIDIA Linux graphics driver development evolves from this unexpected move.
The original article contains 470 words, the summary contains 222 words. Saved 53%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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Both. Ben's taking off for personal reasons (it's literally written in his email, but people will still try to pretend it's related to the recent kerfuffles with Red Hat)
From RH, it's in the (short) article.
That is a good question. Got me thinking too. That title is rather ambiguous.
"I have resigned, and will no longer be taking as active a role in nouveau development."
From the article.
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So what does this mean? He was the main contributer. Is Nouveau the only open source driver Nvidia cards can use on Linux?
The article answers your question
Read the article and was confused. Good thing there's a comment section to ask questions.
I believe so, yes. Other than that there's the official closed driver. Nvidia also "open-sourced" their driver for the RTX 20 series and up, which you could technically run, but I didn't hear much good from it.
No. Since Nvidia began partially opening up their drivers a new open source alternative has been in development based on that info. He's resigning because he thinks the community should focus on that driver instead now.
So there's quite a few errors here:
- NVIDIA creating an open source driver (well, throwing code over the wall once in a while is still open source I guess) does not mean there's an upstream driver. The kernel maintainers have already noted that it's definitely not in any shape to be merged upstream (and would need close to a full rewrite)
- "He's resigning because he thinks the community should focus on that driver instead now" is completely false and I have no idea how you even got to that conclusion. Literally on the same day he posted this email, he also posted initial GSP support which specifically gives us a bright future in nouveau, as it means we can now do funky stuff like reclocking (and which will be further developed by some other people in his team at RH).
Me when I lie on the internet:
33 people who upvoted this (as of writing) now have misinformation in their heads, which they'll probably spread around the internet thanks to you.
Cool can't wait to never play starfield on arch endeavour os
You wouldn't play anything with Nouveau anyway
Well, the other thing Ben just posted before leaving is the initial support for GSP in nouveau (now continued by someone else in his team), which means we can finally start doing things like reclocking. With this and other cool stuff like nvk coming up, we finally have a way forward to have a good upstream experience.
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You could buy a GPU made by a company that actually supports Linux and its users.
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Next one will be, bought a 4080....