First step…

It seems that Tux can safely visit Hell, because last issue it froze over when Nvidia announced it’s starting on the long journey to producing a fully open source driver stack.

It’s clear this is going to be a drawn-out affair. Just look at what happened when AMD bought ATI back in 2006. A year on (mid-2007) it announced it would be open sourcing its driver stack, and the SUSE engineering team began work on the Radeon HD driver.

I’m not even going to try and catalogue the saga here, but by 2012 there was the promise of same-day driver support for the HD 8000 range release. It never came, although by this point performance of the open source driver was getting competitive with the closed-source Catalyst driver. It wasn’t until nine-years after the inital announcement in 2016 and the release of the AMD Radeon RX 480 GPU that Linux saw day-one support through the AMDGPU kernel driver we still enjoy. The AMD open source driver hasn’t looked back, offering better performance than the proprietary one.

It’s a classic example of just how long these things can take. While it’s evident this has been the result of enterprise-level pressure, we look forward to the day we can use Nvidia hardware with fully featured open source drivers!

It’s hardly like we’re lacking in open source to play with though, while we’re not reviewing graphics cards this issue, we do have a pile of Raspberry Pi OSes for you to try, Jonni’s making faster virtual machines, we utilise software KVMs, compose algorithmic music, try out Clonezilla and loads more, so keep on enjoying!