this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
214 points (97.8% liked)

Linux

48069 readers
765 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
top 36 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Anyone willing to test performance etc on Pascal? I'm not particularly confident swapping drivers back and forth since my system is already slow and unstable.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I'd expect extremely poor performance as Nvidia does not allow nouveau to reclock Pascal cards; you'd be stuck at the lowest clocks.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (1 children)

What I think the 'make it or break it' will be for folks is if we see NVENC, DLSS, CUDA support for NVK. The only way I see people who need Nvidia specific features ditching the proprietary drivers is if Nvidia releases proprietary blobs for them. But as for me, I'm ditching the proprietary drivers as soon as NVK performs within 80% of the proprietary drivers.

NVK FTW!!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Unfortunately I need CUDA. I hope either ZLUDA and/or actual CUDA works on NVK in the near future. Better yet AMD could release something that can compete with CUDA but that seems highly improbable.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I hope either ZLUDA and/or actual CUDA works on NVK in the near future.

This is my hope as well. I do think that at least an attempt at CUDA support for NVK is planned, but if it is, it's likely still a ways out. But who knows! They've been progressing so fast, it might come sooner than we think! (Assuming CUDA is even on the roadmap.)

Better yet AMD could release something that can compete with CUDA but that seems highly I. probable.

Unfortunately AMD's focus doesn't seem to be on Ray Tracing/AI or a CUDA alternative at the moment. But this would definitely be a welcomed feature.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

What the.... they're working so fast!!!! At this pace, NVK could probably equal, if not surpass the proprietary drivers by the end of the year!

Only 1 question: how will that affect Wayland support for Nvidia?

I'm an AMD user, but I'm curious.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Ive been trying out nouveau with mesa 24.1, wayland seems better than last time I tried it out on proprietary nvidia drivers. Only issue I've notice is that mouse movement feels weird and performance drops when you move the mouse.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It does not directly affect wayland support in any way unless you're using one of those experimental Wayland in Vulkan modes.

It does affect it indirectly insofar as that, with NVK, you're able to use the nouveau kernel module which exposes standardised interfaces that Wayland relies on without losing the ability to do Vulkan which was not possible previously. If you wanted Vulkan previously, you had to use Nvidia's proprietary driver and its non-standard interfaces that cause issues with Wayland.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It does not directly affect wayland support in any way unless you're using one of those experimental Wayland in Vulkan modes.

Doesn't Zink on NVK support fully compliant OpenGL 4.6?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yes but I don't see how that's related to Wayland as nouveau (mesa OGL) is also capable of driving apps inside a modern desktop.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I think their are plans to switch to Zink on NVK to reduce the maintenance efforts

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Yeah:

For OpenGL support, we are still expecting Zink + NVK to be the plan going forward

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Does it support Maxwell cards? (I use laptop with maxwell card so there's no way to upgrade it) edit: i guess Pascal and older cards are not supported since they wasn't mentioned, only turing and newer. Second edit: looks like they work on older cards but in backporting mode here's the source https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/nvk-holiday-update.html

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

What's the Kepler support like at this time?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Great news for nvidia users.

Not sure if this affects my Pascal card at all (probably not as it's specifically not mentioned). I barely use the dedicated GPU anyway.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Let me know how it works out if you test it. I'm not particularly confident testing it myself because my system already has issues.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I was wondering the same about my Kepler card.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Kepler cards work "OK" with nouveau. What sucks is that reclocking has to be done manually, video decoding/encoding requires firmware blobs and OpenGL support tends to be meh. Overall it's an unstable experience. I have a stack of Kepler based cards that would still be usable if Linux/mesa had a decent driver.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Cool! I assume this this requires non-free binaries. Does anyone know specifics?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago (1 children)

NVK itself is not dependent on anything proprietary, but it's practically required to enable NVIDIA's GSP firmware blob if you want to see actual performance since it's what enables re-clocking (older post by Collabora here which touches on it).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Is the GSP firmware included in linux-firmware yet?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

IIRC, yes, it will come starting with Linux 6.8

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Slight correction, it's available in Linux 6.7, and has to be enabled with the kernel parameter nouveau.config=NvGspRm=1. It may be enabled by default soon though (latest news I could find about that here).

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago

NVK is a new fully open source driver for Nvidia GPUs. Derived from documentation & official FOSS code drops from Nvidia, unlike the legacy Nouveau driver which was mostly the product of reverse engineering proprietary drivers.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Looking at the AUR package, it doesn't look like there's any binary dependencies: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/vulkan-nouveau-git?all_deps=1#pkgdeps

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago
[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The article answers your question

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

How could you possibly know that?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

That's great, but how's performance compared to the normal drivers?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

It seems there's still a bit of work to be done, but it looks promising.

We are actively working on the remaining pieces to support D3D12 emulation via VKD3D-Proton. A lot is already done or in progress but there are still a few pieces missing, so don't expect D3D12 games to work just yet.
[...]
Performance is still a work in progress and continues to improve regularly. A lot of titles are running at 60 FPS or better on recent GPUs. With others, we're seeing bottlenecks that we have yet to triage. If you want to know if your favorite game performs well, the best way is to just try.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago
[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago (1 children)

This is awesome! I don't use the dedicated GPU on my laptop for anything outside light gaming, so I will definitely be switching to this as soon as it is available for Fedora

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

For the foreseeable future, It will probably improve your desktop experience but worsen your gaming performance.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I just want to be able to have good battery life and be able to plug in a display seamlessly if necessary. Right now that seems impossible on Fedora with my laptop. Even windows doesn't do it properly