Collabora Announces NVK, a New Open-Source Vulkan Driver for NVIDIA Hardware in Mesa

posted by Marius Nestor on Oct 04, 2022,
updated Oct 06, 2022

• Collabora Announces NVK, a New Open-Source Vulkan Driver for NVIDIA Hardware in Mesa

  We all know that NVIDIA GPUs don’t receive enough support from the Linux and Open Source community, at least not until NVIDIA finally decided to open source their graphics drivers. The open-source Nouveau driver lacks new hardware support and features, at least compared to the open-source drivers available for AMD and Intel GPUs.

  This is where NVK comes into play, written almost entirely from scratch by Collabora’s Jason Ekstrand, as well as Red Hat’s Karol Herbst and Dave Airlie, using the new official headers from NVIDIA. NVK aims to be the new reference Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware and will ship with an upcoming Mesa graphics stack release.

UPDATE (by Roy)

By Jason Ekstrand:

• Introducing NVK

  For the past several months, I've been working on writing a brand new open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware in Mesa called NVK. This new driver has primarily been written by myself (Jason Ekstrand), along with Karol Herbst and Dave Airlie at Red Hat. In the last month or two, we've started picking up a few commits here and there from community folks and I'm hopeful that community involvement will only increase going forward.

  [...]

  Support for NVIDIA hardware in open-source drivers has always been somewhat lacking. The nouveau drivers exist but they're often missing features, buggy, or just don't support certain cards. This is due to a combination of factors. Unlike the Intel and AMD drivers, nouveau driver stack has been developed with little to no official documentation or help from NVIDIA. They occasionally provide little bits of support here. Historically, it's been mostly focused on enabling nouveau just enough that you can install your Linux distro, get to a web browser, and download their proprietary driver stack.

  Most of the hardware knowledge we (the open-source graphics community) have is learned by reverse-engineering, digging through CUDA documentation (it's amazingly low-level sometimes), and picking through the few bits NVIDIA drops us here and there. This slows down development in the best of times and makes solving certain problems nearly impossible.

LWN:

• Ekstrand: Introducing NVK [LWN.net]

  Jason Ekstrand announces a new Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware on the Collabora blog. It seems to be off to a good start, but there is some work yet to do:

Liam Dawe:

• NVK is a new open source Mesa Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs

  Jason Ekstrand of Collabora just announced NVK, a brand new open source Mesa Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs. No you're not dreaming but it's also not from NVIDIA directly�— as usual the open source community is doing the work.

One more today:

• A New Open Source Vulkan Driver for NVIDIA Graphics is Ready to Test!

  NVK is a new open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA Graphics hardware and aims to be the new go-to graphics driver.

  This was made possible in part due to Nvidia releasing open-source GPU kernel modules for its data center GPUs and consumer cards (GTX/RTX).