Quote [...] when designing some recent new (open-source, yay!) device drivers[...]

Quote Hi Liam,



Here, I was referring to the UVM (Unified [Virtual] Memory) device driver. That shows up as nvidia-uvm.ko, which in turn depends on another driver (currently nvidia.ko) to handle GPU setup. UVM does page faulting, DMA via our GPU's copy engines (DMA units), and generally figures out what pages belong where.



UVM is about 66,000 lines, it's all open source (MIT licensed, right now), and you can find it by running `NVIDIA*.run -x` and looking at the extracted source code.



Future: naturally, it would be interesting to be able to drop in something else (Nouveau?? Tegra? other?) to optionally take the place of nvidia.ko. However, that may or may not happen--there are a lot of things going on, and despite being in the middle of it all, I still cannot yet predict exactly what module layout we'll end up with in, say, a few years. The interface between nvidia.ko and nvidia-uvm.ko is much messier than I'd like, and it will take some engineering time to clean it up--that's good to do in any case...but I'm digressing.



As for what I think you really care about: there are other open source initiatives in NVIDIA. I and others are actively working on them, but unfortunately, we don't quite have a publicly announceable thing yet.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.

Here’s an interesting one, a developer from NVIDIA noted on the Linux Kernel Mailing List that NVIDIA has been designing some new open source drivers. So I did some digging and got an interesting response.Here’s what they said that originally caught my attention ( source , thanks Luke!):I got curious, so I popped the NVIDIA developer who said that an email asking if they would mind clarifying it a bit, so they did and they allowed me to share their reply:This could be something very interesting, but it sounds like it’s still a long ways off right now. It’s interesting to note that NVIDIA are working behind the scenes on more open drivers for Linux, which can only be a good thing for our future. Open drivers are one major reason I keep seeing people switching over to AMD, so perhaps in future with the work from this NVIDIA developer (and others they mentioned) things may change for the better.They may even go the amdgpu route, where part of it is open and part closed.