Tranquility
zmaint
You'll have to distinguish between these new-ish open kernel modules and the full open source Nvidia drivers. These nvidia-open kernel modules still depend on large parts of the proprietary driver. So by running them you're still far away from full open source drivers like nouveau, the latter of which is known for poor performance, especially on newer cards.
There are some things only possible with the open modules, as well as some potential slight downsidea
The following features will only work with the open kernel modules flavor of the driver:
- NVIDIA Confidential Computing
- Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage (GDS)
- Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM)
- CPU affinity for GPU fault handlers
- DMABUF support for CUDA allocations
The following are some known limitations of the open kernel modules versus the proprietary kernel modules with GSP firmware mode disabled:
- GPU initialization is slower. One possible mitigation is to use nvidia-persistenced to initialize the GPU(s) in advance, before running applications that use the GPU.
- Enter and exit latencies for power-saving modes like S3, S4 and Run Time D3 (RTD3) can be longer due to additional GSP state being restored.
- GPU power consumption can be marginally impacted in some scenarios.
- Run Time D3 (RTD3) is only supported on Ampere and above GPUs.
Nvidia now recommends the use of the open kernel modules on all GPUs that support it, which is every GPU starting from the Turing generation.
See https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/580.119.02/README/kernel_open.html
Also, on Blackwell cards (the 5000 series) you HAVE to use the open kernel modules for them to function.
