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they *what*? (double-checks the date to make sure it's not April)

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Congratulations to @nvidia for finally open sourcing their kernel drivers. Long time coming, but absolutely the right move. Looking forward to sending some PRs :).

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746

Catherine

@whitequark

May 11

they really did! for Turing+ GPUs only, but still developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-re

github.com

GitHub - NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules: NVIDIA Linux open GPU kernel module source

NVIDIA Linux open GPU kernel module source. Contribute to NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules development by creating an account on GitHub.

263

Catherine

@whitequark

May 11

they... acknowledge Nouveau as existing and desirable? hell really did freeze over

In the meantime, published source code serves as a reference to help improve the Nouveau driver. Nouveau can leverage the same firmware used by the NVIDIA driver, exposing many GPU functionalities, such as clock management and thermal management, bringing new features to the in-tree Nouveau driver.

Stay tuned for more developments in future driver releases and collaboration on GitHub.

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Daniel Micay

@DanielMicay

Replying to

@whitequark

It's not as new as it seems because their Tegra kernel drivers were always open source for Android. Pixel C uses Nouveau as the kernel driver because Google worked with NVIDIA to extend the in-tree kernel driver with Tegra support. The userspace library was still closed source.

9:27 PM · May 11, 2022Twitter Web App

Replying to

and

Tegra Android kernel drivers were entirely open source and didn't require as many closed source libraries as Qualcomm at the time. It's likely only the GPU driver library would have remained closed source with a Mesa-based alternative showing up due to official Nouveau support.

Replying to

and

They never had any success in the smartphone market and gave up on the tablet market. Google seemed to be very interested in having a more competitive SoC market and a vendor willing to do away with closed source libraries. Nexus 9 / Pixel C didn't sell enough to prop that up.