Nvidia makes its GPU drivers for Linux open source available

Nvidia makes the Linux drivers for its GPUs open source, starting with the R515 release. The company’s GPU kernel modules will be available on GitHub under GPL and MIT licenses.

Initially, the focus will be on data center GPUs based on the Turing and Ampere architecture. The open source code for those GPUs according to Nvidia ‘production ready’. The code for GeForce and workstation GPUs is “alpha-quality” with the R515 release, Nvidia warns. Better consumer card support will follow in later releases. In time it is intended that the open source release will completely replace the current closed source driver. The company does not currently provide a concrete timeline for this.

In addition to the source code, Nvidia also makes fully-built packages of the open source drivers available. Nvidia says its code disclosure is helping developers debug the drivers and integrate them into operating systems. Developers can also contribute to improving the drivers. Pull requests are checked in advance and finally put in the release when approved.

Also, the driver isn’t ready to be generally included upstream in the Linux kernel. Nvidia does say that the driver can be used directly on Ubuntu and SUSE’s enterprise distros. An upstream release for Red Hat is also being worked on. Nvidia places the drivers online under a GPL/MIT license, which means that others can also distribute the modules. Nvidia has the source code of the R515 driver now posted on GitHub.