Someone should port the NVidia open-source driver to FreeBSD.

RetroComputingCollector

RetroComputingCollector

I think that the open-source Linux driver should be ported to BSD. I know that T-Aoki said that they do not have a Turing GPU, but they are readily available on Ebay, and I think plenty of people would gladly donate an old Turing GPU if it means better NVidia support. Does anyone want to port the NVidia open-source driver, I (and many others) would be eternally grateful if it means that there is better (or at least fully open) support.
 
My understanding is that the so-called open source driver is just moving a lot of parts from the driver into firmware, thereby removing some binary-delivered code in the driver. I highly doubt that this extended firmware is friendly to porting to other OSes. And the remaining driver, while open source, could be hard to grog since no documentation about its onner workings exist.
 
How does "old Turing GPU support" fit into/affect/work with Current or more recent Nvidia GPUs? Example: I have a system currently supported by nvidia-driver-470; would that be supported by the open source turing driver? If not then a port of the old Turing driver does not benefit me.
Now if the old Turing driver would support my GPU, the next question is does it offer more than the proprietary blob?
 
RetroComputingCollector said:
Ugh. It was just something I wished for. Not something I expect to exist.
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I'm trying to understand the benefit to the community as a whole. If it supports hardware that less than 5% of users have instead of hardware that 80% of users have, the math is different.
I'm not saying it's an unreasonable ask, but more how many benefit from the effort.
 
Somebody should stop posting those stupid threads. We (FreeBSD) are not in a hurry because the driver is not fully open-source, only the kernel part is. This has some benefit (easier debugging), but should not really concern you — no difference for end users is expected. Also Turing is not that old. Nor is it particularly necessary, any later generation would do just fine.
cracauer@ said:
I highly doubt that this extended firmware is friendly to porting to other OSes.
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It runs on the GPU (by definition), it doesn't care about the host. Besides both Intel and AMD have similarly complex GPU firmware, nothing unusual about that.
 
shkhln said:
It runs on the GPU (by definition), it doesn't care about the host. Besides both Intel and AMD have similarly complex GPU firmware, nothing unusual about that.
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Yeah, it runs on the GPU, but it can do all kinds of interactions with the CPU-running driver, including OS-specific ones.

If it was truly neutral then the code that was moved would never have been in the OS driver in the first place.
 
I think the main benefit of Nouveau is that it supports old Nvidia GPUs such as the 470, which will no longer be supported in FreeBSD 15.0 (if I understand correctly). One of the advantages of UNIX variants is that they don't require you to replace your aging PC with a new one just because the OS has been 'upgraded' and the old version is no longer supported.

However, it is the nature of free, open source software that no one is motivated to develop something unless they want it themselves or if they get paid enough to do it for others. Saying that someone should do something does not go down very well.
 
Useradd said:
I think the main benefit of Nouveau is that it supports old Nvidia GPUs such as the 470, which will no longer be supported in FreeBSD 15.0 (if I understand correctly).
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Now that would benefit me directly; so I need to be careful if I upgrade that one system to 15.X.
 
RetroComputingCollector said:
I think that the open-source Linux driver should be ported to BSD. I know that T-Aoki said that they do not have a Turing GPU, but they are readily available on Ebay, and I think plenty of people would gladly donate an old Turing GPU if it means better NVidia support. Does anyone want to port the NVidia open-source driver, I (and many others) would be eternally grateful if it means that there is better (or at least fully open) support.
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Im willing to donate a card to you, if you can build this driver. I wish you do this for me.
 
RetroComputingCollector said:
I think that the open-source Linux driver should be ported to BSD.
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No. We (2 committers and me who are working on nvidia driver things) discussed about it on late June this year and decided not to.

As far as I was told (and not sure I can disclose in detail), even if we can build the open-source Linux driver, basically it matches with currently available FreeBSD driver for anything already provided natively for FreeBSD.

But porting still-nonexistent-for-FreeBSD kmods like nvidia-uvm.ko could be benefical and the reason why we're not trying is simply "the lack of human resources and the lack of some support codes in LinuxKPI", as it would work for pre-GSP GPUs.

In other words, it's not worth doing comparing estimated work and estimated benefits.

RetroComputingCollector said:
I know that T-Aoki said that they do not have a Turing GPU, but they are readily available on Ebay, and I think plenty of people would gladly donate an old Turing GPU if it means better NVidia support.
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Unfortunately, my computer using for porting work is "notebook".

cracauer@ said:
My understanding is that the so-called open source driver is just moving a lot of parts from the driver into firmware, thereby removing some binary-delivered code in the driver. I highly doubt that this extended firmware is friendly to porting to other OSes. And the remaining driver, while open source, could be hard to grog since no documentation about its onner workings exist.
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As far as I know, mostly correct. And it would be because the open-source version of drivers support GPUs with GSP only.

mer said:
I have a system currently supported by nvidia-driver-470; would that be supported by the open source turing driver?
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As mentioned above, no.
And you're lucky. 3xx series of drivers (means, supporting i386) are already EoL'ed upstream on 2022. I'm preparing for a heads-up for posting to freebsd-ports ML but not yet finished. Why we've not dropped them from ports is just because no CVEs found for them and still available for downloading. Once becomes unavailable, we need to drop them from ports.

mer said:
Now if the old Turing driver would support my GPU, the next question is does it offer more than the proprietary blob?
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Nothing, as already mentioned.
 
Port it from NetBSD, they have a more modern working model for Nvidia. Their opens source models use the modern EXA mode for 2D accelerations, which other operating systems didn't bother with. Linux doesn't even have that, and NetBSD does.

NetBSD Blog

blog.netbsd.org blog.netbsd.org
Tried to file a bug report for it, but it was closed: PR 289289.

They say upstream it or it needs a patch for them to do anything there, but they often choose to do nothing upstream. They always say, but I like it the Linux way. I used to show them how something would compile and work showing the minor changes I've made in the past. They need to port stuff from NetBSD. That was an excuse to close it. Asking to port what NetBSD has for EXA, which means it's already been developed. That was wrong to close it, since not everything sent to Bugzilla has a patch coming with it. Bugzilla is a place to report what's missing that's available from elsewhere, or what's wrong, or asking for new features. Patches are included in Bug reports. That was an excuse to not having something which belongs in Bugzilla.

I would move to NetBSD. There's still some things which lack, but there's a lot over there that's better than on FreeBSD. Shit like this is why people leave FreeBSD.

I have sent a bug report about ugold, to monitor its status, that it has a version which works with USBHID, or not be in the next release. I didn't have a patch for that. Over half of what gets sent to any Bugzilla doesn't have patches with them, otherwise it would be called Patchzilla, not Bugzilla. But GIT already is Patchzilla.
 
For years I was compiling drivers DLed from Nvidia site (bc maintaining STABLE on my box from ver to ver), until recently T-Aoki politely explained to me advantages of using ports version (can't remember thread to link, sorry).

But (honest question), what for we'll need yet another driver version?
 
It would be an open source version, which Nvidia likes to keep tabs on with providing their proprietary version. At least they provide the driver. Other GPU companies released open source stacks for their GPU's. The EXX driver for other drivers from 2D acceleration in X server is obsolete. No one in the open source world bothered to fix opensource drivers for the modern EXA. Except NetBSD.

It may not be comparable, but it's a big leap.
 
vmisev said:
For years I was compiling drivers DLed from Nvidia site (bc maintaining STABLE on my box from ver to ver), until recently T-Aoki politely explained to me advantages of using ports version (can't remember thread to link, sorry).

But (honest question), what for we'll need yet another driver version?
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Possibly any of these?
Trying to understand why only some kind of vmm.ko module allows to passthru my nvidia GPU to a WIndows 11 vm #295

Nvidia 5080 Testing in FreeBSD #6
 
since freeBSD is the other platform that NVidia has mainline drivers in, I don't think it's worth the offert to futz with nouveau. nouveau sucks anyways: buggy and less features. I understand the desire for FOSS in all things online, but the DRM/DRI infrastrcture is lame and IMHO no video drivers should be based on it...just take a look and the AMDgpu drivers: slow and buggy...but ask any FOSS zealot and they'll continue to espouse the virtues, and will present AMDgpu as a model of how ASIC manufacture and FOSS folks and can cooperate to do "good things". I too think NVidia needs to make a better commitment to supporting non-windoze OS, but the existing FOSS video drivers models just suck.
 
kent_dorfman766 said:
since freeBSD is the other platform that NVidia has mainline drivers in, I don't think it's worth the offert to futz with nouveau
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exactly this.
Especially because I highly doubt that nouveau driver is worth it. It was one of those typical linux projects where endlessly discussing about licenses/politics/esoteric believe systems was more important than producing working code and hence was merely beta quality (at best) for over 10 years, and I highly doubt this has gotten any better. *Especially* compared to the native nvidia driver...
 
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