It’s too bad that there’s still a proprietary binary layer that this driver will talk to. (I’m assuming right/wrong that it’s not open source, since it’s binary.)

I must’ve missed that from in the post. Do you have more information on that?

The article mentions the following …

the NOVA driver is intentionally limited to the RTX 20 “Turing” GPUs and newer where there is the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) with the firmware support to leverage for an easier driver-writing experience.

Also in the same article, there’s a link to another article that mentions it a little bit more …

“… serving as a hard- and firmware abstraction layer for GSP-based NVIDIA GPUs.”

I’ve also read something about it from other places, other articles as well …

The GSP is binary-only firmware loaded at run-time. The open-source kernel driver explicitly depends upon the GSP-supported graphics processors.

Basically, some/allot of the Nvidia “magic” is in their hardware/firmware, and that they are not open source.

Feel free to double check me on this though, that’s just my interpretation based on quickly reading some articles over the last six months or so.

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