How is it different. Wouldn’t just be the same software with source code available?
It’s not, they’re not open sourcing their driver. They’ve made an open source driver.
Is there a reason to reinvent the wheel?
Usually this is done for licensing reasons. They probably don’t want the old code caught up in the open license they’re shipping the new driver under.
My understanding is that the new open driver separates proprietary code into a black box binary blob that isn’t distributed under an open source license. I’m guessing that they’ve been very careful not to include anything they want to keep closed into the new open driver, whereas the old driver wasn’t written with this separation in mind.
I was wondering about what they were doing with their “secret sauce”, thanks for explaining.
Control, precedent, bean counter analysis etc. Pick your poison.
Some of it probably comes from other companies that are unable or unwilling to relicense it even if Nvidia wanted to
Yes
Performance parity? Heck no, not until this bug with the GSP firmware is solved: https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/538
Anyone tried this beta version yet? Any idea how stable it is?
I been using the open kernel driver with my Debian Workstation, it has worked better then the default driver by far with the Debian backport Kernel, I installed it using the Nvidia Cuda Repo.
Woohoo!
