NVIDIA’S CHANGE OF HEART

This feature was in part motivated by Nvidia’s release of an open source driver, which is production ready for its datacentre GPUs, and alphaquality for its consumer cards. Exactly when we’ll see distributions start including this driver is a mystery, but the change of strategy is welcome. You can check out this driver right now at https://github.com/NVIDIA/ open-gpu-kernel-modules. Only newer cards (post-Turing, where a r515 or later driver is available) are supported, and you still need firmware from the binary driver. It’s possible to install that using the .run file from

nvidia.com without the closed modules using, for example:

$ sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-515.57.run --no-kernel-modules

Or if you don’t mind a pre-compiled version of the open modules you can get that from the .run file using the -m=kernel-open . Finally, in order to use the module on consumer cards you need to flip a switch to let it know you don’t mind ‘alpha-quality’. This requires creating a file,

/etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf containing the text:

options nvidia NVreg_OpenRmEnableUnsupportedGpus=1

Older cards, including Pascal cards like the GTX1080 aren’t supported because the open driver relies on newer architecture. An open source solution exists for these cards in the form of Nouveau, although performance won’t be good because there’s no reclocking support. And Nouveau doesn’t include a Vulkan driver yet.

There are signs of hope, though. Nvidia has released the signed firmware files for Ampere (RTX30 series) GPUs that enables reclocking. Old school Nvidia GTX 600/700 cards don’t require this signed firmware, and Nouveau support on this hardware has long been in rude shape.