this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2024
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I don't know what to pick. (lemmy.one)
submitted 3 months ago by wallmenis@lemmy.one to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Hey this maybe a stupid question. I am considering on buying a GPU. I am in conflict between nvidia and AMD. I know AMD works better on linux in general but I am curious to follow the NVIDIA advancements as they go with the new open source kernel modules and stuff... I don't know if it is worth it to pick team green over team red. Also typically performance will be better with NVIDIA on compute and stuff like that.

P.S.

Yes, this is related to the previous post I made here.

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[–] sovietknuckles@hexbear.net 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I know AMD works better on linux in general but I am curious to follow the NVIDIA advancements as they go with the new open source kernel modules and stuff...

How is it open source? In the history of the whole repository, there were 11 merged PRs in 2022 (when the project began), and no merged PRs after, even though lots of PRs have been submitted since then. There has never been an issue-fixing PR merged, and no issues or PRs are submitted by the maintainers of the project.

A maintainer explains their workflow:

Because we will be sharing this code with our proprietary driver, we won't be developing in the open for now. So far, our strategy is to apply proposed changes to our internal code base, merge pull requests on github, and then do one NVIDIA github commit per driver release (and because the internal code base also contains the change, the release-time commit should not revert the merged pull request). It is not a great workflow, but we're trying to navigate the constraints as best we can.

All of their commits are tagged versions, none of which tell you in words what they did or what changed. As the maintainer says, they still do their actual development internally, and the GitHub repository does not contain that incremental work. Because the commits are releases only, there are only 66 commits on the main branch from May 2022 to the latest commit/release 2 weeks ago.

So whatever benefit you were hoping to get from Nvidia's kernel modules being open source probably is not there.

[–] Markaos@lemmy.one 1 points 3 months ago

How is it open source?

How is it not? Open source doesn't mean you have to accept other people's code. And it is perfectly valid to only dump code for every release, even some GNU projects (like GCC) used to work that way. Hell, there's even a book about the two different approaches in open source.

So whatever benefit you were hoping to get from Nvidia's kernel modules being open source probably is not there.

It allowed the actual in-tree nouveau kernel module to take the code for interacting with the GSP firmware to allow changing GPU clock speed - in other words no more being stuck on the lowest possible frequency like with the GTX 10 series cards. Seems like a pretty decent benefit to me.