Red Hat to author new Linux driver for Nvidia GPUs in Rust

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Red-Hat-Nova-Rust-Abstractions

by dralley • 2 years ago

224 117 2 years ago

phoronix.com

bionhoward• 2 years ago

This is great news. Likely to make it easier to use these GPUs in Linux.

adamnemecek• 2 years ago

The tide is turning.

superkuh• 2 years ago

and without the Nouveau baggage that's built up over the years in supporting NVIDIA GPUs going back to its early days.

Not supporting most nvidia hardware is not a good thing. I hope it's adoption by commercial users (home users don't have the latest nvidia gpu generally) doesn't mean Nouveau bitrots from lack of companies with deep pockets paying for dev work. As for the inherent memory safety, well, remember how safe memory safe java was?

nickpsecurity• 2 years ago

Java the language was memory safe. The runtime and libraries weren’t all memory safe. The JIT’s can break memory safety. Applets had integration issues. So, what hurt Java were opportunities to go around memory safety instead of attacking that memory-safe code.

Memory-safe, system languages (eg Ada, Rust) address this by having as much as possible in memory safety with either little or zero runtime. Rust makes things safe that weren’t before. It has unsafe which is less used than some other languages. The type checker can also catch many logic-level errors. The safety situation is better with Rust than Java code.

That doesn’t mean it will solve NVIDIA users’ problems, though. They are usually worried about compatibility, performance, and reliability. Rust mostly helps in one area. We’ll see about the rest, especially compatibility, as you said.

KerrAvon• 2 years ago

Java was crippled by a terrible standard UI library and a failure to recognize the opportunity for a natively-compiled systems language other than C++.

mlindner• 2 years ago

Java is forever stuck in my head as a bad language because it's UI library performance were so bad. I grew up being annoyed with anything written in Java because of its poor performance on Mac OS X. Notable was the persistent UI lag with anything written in Java.

cozzyd2• 2 years ago

indeed, already new official nvidia drivers don't support the aging Nvidia card I have in my desktop at home (the desktop is newer than the video card, I moved it from an older computer).

lproven• 2 years ago

I had this problem at $JOB-1 where I had a big fat Dell desktop workstation with an nVidia card in it. I don't remember the model but it was a "pro" grade device: Fire or Quadro or some such BS marketing name.

There were lots of old LCD monitors around the office. As soon as I could, I went dual screen. Then I decided to go triple-head.

Problem.

I found a 2nd card, another nVidia, but it was a different GPU generation. The same Nouveau driver can run it, but not the nVidia driver, and you can't have two nVidia drivers installed side-by-side.

I tried multiple nVidia cards from the office spares pile but I couldn't find two the same generation of GPU for ages. When I finally did, the next kernel upgrade nuked the nVidia legacy driver -- it only supports a certain range of kernel versions.

In the end, a colleague took pity and lent me one of his own cards, an old gamer's card with 4 outputs, 3 usable at once. Perfect.

But when he wanted it back, to sell it, it was back into driver hell.

In the end, I managed to get a huge fat double-slot AMD card from the IT department, with 4 outputs, and it Just Worked™ with a FOSS driver.

NVidia driver versions are a massive cluster-fsck and perfectly good working cards are now e-waste because nVidia doesn't maintain its proprietary drivers, doesn't support more than a handful of GPU families in each release, and won't let you install >1 driver at a time.

I am not a gamer. I don't give a rat's ass about 3D performance or CUDA or any of those toys. I just want a shedload of pixels in front of me, updated quickly, with some screens in portrait and some in landscape. (And a desktop that properly supports vertical panels so I can use those screens in any orientation I want with effective use of space.)

uluyol4• 2 years ago

The chances of getting Nouveau working well on older Nvidia hardware are essentially zero. There are legal issues with firmware redistribution.

Little hope of reclocking becoming available for GM20x, GP10x and GV100 as firmware now needs to be signed by NVIDIA to have the necessary access

From https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/

kelnos5• 2 years ago

When they say "early" days, I think they mean really old GPUs, like before the reclocking locks started becoming a thing.

rascul• 2 years ago

Looks like the oldest card nouveau supports is the Riva TNT from 1998. I think it's fine for nouveau to support that and a new driver not to. I didn't get the impression that nouveau is going away any time soon.

doix• 2 years ago

I am totally out of the loop here, but wasn't the main problem with Nouveau the lack of documentation from Nvidia? They had to reverse engineer things to get it working.

I get that some of the architectural choices no longer make sense, and starting from scratch will address those. But is the goal to have performance that is somewhat comparable to the proprietary drivers? Or just good enough to run the desktop environment with hardware acceleration.

porphyra• 2 years ago

My understanding is that nowadays most of the heavy lifting is done by magic going on in the firmware, so the actual driver is relatively simple and is open source: https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules

roenxi• 2 years ago

Any efforts by Nvidia are welcome, but that raises the question of why Red Hat are writing a new driver. Presumably there is some aspect of the OSS component that is dissatisfying Red Hat.

It is weird for a 3rd party to be maintaining a 2nd driver when the first party has a reasonable OSS driver.

denzil• 2 years ago

I'm not sure if it's different for Nvidia, but the Gamer Nexus video about Intel drivers suggest a lot of the work getting good performance is done on the driver side for all GPU vendors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp3BGu3vixk

Tuna-Fish• 2 years ago

Shader compilation happens on CPU, and is neither simple nor (for the nvidia compiler) open source.

GPU drivers are significantly more complicated than any other drivers because they do things that are not considered part of a driver for any other device, the proprietary nV driver contains roughly as much code as the linux kernel.

wezm• 2 years ago

NVIDIA started publishing more of their driver as open-source in 2022, which while not hardware documentation probably helps a lot.

You may be wondering why Red Hat is bothering with this effort then? I assume it’s so that the code can be added to Linux directly as opposed to being out of tree.

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-sourc...

wmf• 2 years ago

They're still reverse engineering. The hardware is so good that people would rather use an Nvidia GPU with reverse engineered drivers than AMD with open documentation and official open source drivers. Same with Apple and Asahi.

weikju• 2 years ago

Cynically, I’m thinking the main “problem” being solve here is the current drivers are not written in Rust

throwaway484762• 2 years ago

Unless the problem is memory safety, probably not.

KingOfCoders• 2 years ago

My first thought too.

AtlasBarfed• 2 years ago

The cynicism if red hat is involved is that red hat wants more control of Linux.

Christ could they just make Wayland usable first?

lyu072822• 2 years ago

I was hoping they officially partnered with NVIDIA in that effort, perhaps eventually even replacing the proprietary one on Linux. But then I awoke from that dream, it's less exciting. Still cool though.

Unfortunately Linux Desktop still seems to be too irrelevant for NVIDIA. All current drivers have issues with suspend, multiple displays and Wayland among other things.

xorcist2• 2 years ago

Which is a bit surprising because they make their money from the AI/LLM hype now, which presumably is all Linux.

So Linux should be a priority for them, just not on the desktop. But the step should be small.

uluyol4• 2 years ago

The problem with Nouveau was that Nvidia hardware could not be reclocked (the cores were basically always in low power mode) without a signed firmware blob. That blob couldn't be legally distributed except by Nvidia, so the open source folks more or less gave up on a high performance driver.

Now, for newer hardware, Nvidia has changed some aspects of the firmware and allows redistribution. So it's feasible to make a good open source driver.

AMD and Intel also use different drivers for different hardware generations, since eventually things change so much that it's better to start clean.

With regards to reverse engineering, Mesa has a number of reverse engineered drivers. That isn't anything new.

wengo314• 2 years ago

the problem was the nouveau would do this before when firmware was easy to intercept from the driver (and could be extracted easily). the newer driver uses different methods of firmware upload and it's a real chore to do so now.

so nouveau gave up on it. they also expected nvidia to drop some firmware.

now that newer cards have GSP.bin firmware, which can be interfaced with easily - things are different. i would wager a guess that it's similar to atombios from amd. you just call a function in GSP and it knows what registers to poke with the right values to achieve what you need.

inamberclad• 2 years ago

A coworker of mine formerly worked on Nvidia's proprietary drivers. They remarked at just how wrong the Nouveau driver was about certain things, including the functionality and reasons for certain registers.

kelnos5• 2 years ago

Around a decade ago, I was introduced to a couple people who it turned out worked at nvidia. After a bunch of conversation, nouveau came up; they were intensely negative about it, mocking it and its developers, criticizing its existence, even, and declaring it would never amount to anything. (Meanwhile, I was running it on a computer at home and it was significantly more stable than the nvidia proprietary driver at the time, and performed well enough for my use.)

I wish I'd had more conversational courage at the time to "stand up" for nouveau with them; it was super rude to shit on someone else's hard work, especially when the reason why they had to do that hard work was because nvidia was a bunch of jerks with a shitty FOSS policy.

bogantech• 2 years ago

Given that there's no official documentation and they can only learn through reverse engineering this is not at all surprising.

Presumably RedHat are in the same boat.

aumerle• 2 years ago

Sigh. So yet another rewrite, which will result in yet another round of regressions. Hopefully, at the end of it we will have something better than yet another unofficial driver with partial functionality that lags behind in support for newer hardware.

It's a real shame that many things in Linux land are so badly designed/maintained that they have to be re-written from scratch every few years. The major exception being the base kernel itself I suppose.

tristan957• 2 years ago

This is completely on Nvidia. Don't buy a GPU from them if you care about Linux support.

Mathnerd314• 2 years ago

My understanding was that the proprietary drivers work fine.

uluyol4• 2 years ago

Which regressions for Nvidia hardware are you talking about?

Nouveau supports seriously ancient Nvidia hardware. It's perfectly reasonable to make a clean break once in a while (both AMD and Intel have done it in their open source drivers).

bdjsiqoocwk• 2 years ago

And the church of rust is contributing to the problem.

saidinesh5• 2 years ago

Does anyone know How or where would this fits alongside the recent NVK driver by collabora?

www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/introducing-nvk.html

nan60• 2 years ago

This new driver (along with the modules Nvidia have released as OSS [1]) are kernel drivers and do not break userspace. NVK is a Vulkan implementation for Nvidia GPUs as part of the Mesa project (the same project that AMD's userspace drivers are a part of, even though AMDs kernel drivers are in tree). They are both needed to make a cohesive driver.

[1] https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules

uluyol4• 2 years ago

The kernel driver manages things like display setup, memory management (isolation between processes), and funneling of commands from user space to the hardware. This is more a replacement for Nouveau than NVK.

NVK generates the commands to send to the hardware, by converting vulkan APIs to Nvidia-specific instructions, and feeds them to the kernel driver.

toughruck• 2 years ago

Does the compilation time bother anyone?

sph3• 2 years ago

When's the last time you have compiled the kernel? I bet waiting for Rust drivers to compile on a modern CPU should not take much longer than the last time I compiled the kernel by hand on a Core 2 Duo, circa 2013

atlasduo• 2 years ago

You make two short-sighted assumptions:

1. "Nobody compiles a kernel these days". Sure, maybe not for daily use for most, but lots of people do for work and experimentation. Also, Gentoo.

2. "Everybody runs a modern CPU". Plenty of people still run decade-old hardware, and even older, because it works and in that decade objectives of PC have not significantly changed, so why would hardware?

nebula88043• 2 years ago

When's the last time you have compiled the kernel?

2010. I needed to do so for my Linux Kernel university class.

It took 8 hours on this piece of junk Pentium 4 I found in the school's e-waste bin. You know those Black Dell Optiplex machines that were everywhere like a plague.

They were days of such stress but also so much bliss.

ListeningPie3• 2 years ago

Now that Nvidia is the leader in AI, there is more of a business case for them to work properly in Linux.

ZiiS• 2 years ago

Their AI stuff has always been Linux first, they have just not cared about Wayland at all or X11 very much.

ListeningPie3• 2 years ago

Is it on their graphics cards or is it a separate product line?

resource_waste• 2 years ago

As the other person mentioned.

AI has been flawless on Linux IMO(maybe not when it tries to use RAM instead of VRAM). When I use a server, I have 0 issues.

I used to get an occasional nvidia issue with 2 monitors and steam, but that went away at some-point.

ListeningPie3• 2 years ago

Do they use different drivers than on their GeForce cards. A NVIDIA driver update broke my kernel.

ta12312344• 2 years ago

I don't get it - they want to sell hardware. Microsoft v Linux v MacOS aside, why don't they care at all? I can understand Linux might get a little ... fickle. But why weigh into this? Put all your energy into drivers for all, and sell more product.

thelastparadise2• 2 years ago

they want to sell hardware

Tight control of software and licensing is a core part of their business model.

someguydave• 2 years ago

Nvidia clearly thinks that their driver and SDK is part of their moat and they are mostly correct

Red Hat to author new Linux driver for Nvidia GPUs in Rust

Related Stories