“Rather surprisingly I can happily write about the release of an actual open source graphics driver released by Nvidia. This has been a long time coming. I don’t expect to say this often (I’d love to be proven wrong), but kudos to Nvidia for the engagement with open source. That said, it’s not as “open” you might assume, but it’s still a dramatic improvement upon where we were.
When you think about it, it’s less surprising that Nvidia would do this now. It’s finally getting more competition (from Intel, which know how to do open source graphics drivers), the “crypto” market is tanking, and there are emerging opportunities in edge and HPC that would be much better served by providing open source drivers for users.
Those deploying large HPC clusters are likely to be unimpressed by needing to also deploy a giant proprietary binary blob into their kernels.