Hacker News

points by afarah1 4 days ago | 0 comments

New generations such as Blackwell have open source kernel modules, there is not even a proprietary option. I thought there was a move in this direction?

https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-transitions-fully-t...

[–] kllrnohj 3 days ago

Nvidia enabled that by offloading stuff that used to be in the proprietary driver onto the still proprietary GPU firmware. Making it, if anything, less open source as it's now harder to inspect what it's doing at runtime since it's now out of reach of even the kernel

[–] maxhille 4 days ago

AFAIK the open source kernel driver pushes a signed proprietary 500Mb firmware blob into the GPU.

[–] NekkoDroid 4 days ago

The total linux-firmware-nvidia package for Archlinux uncompressed (outer, the firmware blobs are also compressed on top of that) is ~160MB (Mb would be Megabit), with the biggest individual compressed blob being ~50MB.

[–] maxhille 4 days ago

You are right the firmware packages are smaller. I mixed it up with the VRAM the GSP uses after being loaded.

Point was about the kernel drivers being open-source enabling hackability - they don't, the card hardware is just as closed as before.

[–] mrheosuper 3 days ago

50MB is a lot of code. Linux kernel in minimal config will use significantly less than that.

[–] NekkoDroid 3 days ago

Never wanted to imply it wasn't. AMDGPUs firmware package is a total of 27MB and the biggest single blob is 1,5MB.