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Comment by robhlt | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia's kernel driver is open source now [1], they just do the important HDMI bits in their closed source GSP firmware. Basically they moved the proprietary stuff to firmware and open sourced the rest. AMD could do something similar, but it would require a hardware change on their side (the GSP was a new bit of hardware added in Turing Nvidia GPUs).

1. https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules

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> Basically they moved the proprietary stuff to firmware and open sourced the rest

I'm pretty sure they also moved a lot of stuff to a closed source user-space component, right?

This quote from that readme also seems to indicate a required user-space component that I'm pretty sure is not open sourced?

> Note that the kernel modules built here must be used with GSP firmware and user-space NVIDIA GPU driver components from a corresponding 590.44.01 driver release

The closed-source user-space component isn't new, the drivers always contained a kernel module and user-space libraries. Those libraries provide an OpenGL and Vulkan implementation. It's equivalent to Mesa for AMD and Intel GPUs (and the kernel driver is equivalent to amdgpu and i915 respectively).

Since it's closed we can't really know for sure if anything was moved to it from the kernel, but I think it's quite unlikely something like HDMI link setup was moved to user-space instead of to firmware.

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