• onlinepersona@programming.dev
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    5 hours ago

    It’s too bad that there’s still a proprietary binary layer that this driver will talk to. (I’m assuming right/wrong that it’s not open source, since it’s binary.)

    I must’ve missed that from in the post. Do you have more information on that?

    Anti Commercial-AI license

    • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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      3 minutes ago

      It’s too bad that there’s still a proprietary binary layer that this driver will talk to. (I’m assuming right/wrong that it’s not open source, since it’s binary.)

      I must’ve missed that from in the post. Do you have more information on that?

      The article mentions the following …

      the NOVA driver is intentionally limited to the RTX 20 “Turing” GPUs and newer where there is the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) with the firmware support to leverage for an easier driver-writing experience.

      Also in the same article, there’s a link to another article that mentions it a little bit more …

      “… serving as a hard- and firmware abstraction layer for GSP-based NVIDIA GPUs.”

      I’ve also read something about it from other places, other articles as well.

      Basically, some/allot of the Nvidia “magic” is in their hardware/firmware, and that they are not open source.

      Feel free to double check me on this though, that’s just my interpretation based on quickly reading some articles over the last 6 months or so.

      This comment is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

    • Semperverus@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      One of the (now ex) maintainers by the name of Christoph Hellwig said that they don’t want multiple languages in their area of the kernel because it becomes hard to maintain, and specifically called out the fact that it wasn’t targeted at Rust - they would have rejected Assembly too. The Rust developer by the name of Hector (can’t remember his last name) pushing the change took it as a personal attack, flipped his shit and quit after trying to attack Christoph and get him removed for describing the introduction of another language as being akin to a “cancer.”

      Then Linus came in, noticed that the change wasn’t actually pushing any non-C code into the kernel and told the maintainer that it wasn’t his area to block in the first place, and that he has no place telling others what to do outside of the kernel.

      So we lost a kernel maintainer and a Rust developer over one issue.