this post was submitted on 12 May 2022
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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When I saw this headline I couldn't help but wonder if this might be related to that blackmail thing back in March... but sadly from how not-comprehensive it is, it clearly isn't.
Only Turing (their microarchitecture introduced in late 2018) and newer GPUs will be supported by this open-source kernel driver, because it uses their new new "GPU System Processor (GSP)" architecture which involves loading binary firmware (which they aren't opening the source for) on the GPU at runtime.
NVIDIA's user-space libraries and OpenGL / Vulkan / OpenCL / CUDA drivers remain closed-source.
Having the kernel module be open source (and maybe one day accepted in mainline) will certainly make life easier for some people (especially nvidia engineers), but from the security, privacy, and philosophical standpoints, this doesn't really change much.
so,
🖕 Nvidia
(still)