Skip to content

Make Nvidia even clearer, remove references to "open drivers" #280

@alexvojproc

Description

@alexvojproc

At the moment, our Images page has six tables like this:

| Name | Base | NVIDIA Support | ARM64 Support |
|-------------------------------------------|-----------|-------------------------|------------------------|
| `silverblue-main-hardened` | Silverblue| No | Beta |
| `silverblue-nvidia-hardened` | Silverblue| Yes, closed drivers | No |
| `silverblue-nvidia-open-hardened` | Silverblue| Yes, open drivers | No |

When users are selecting the right image to download, I think a common point of confusion is between nvidia-open and Nouveau (in main). Nvidia-open are not open drivers (as far as I'm aware), but rather just the kernel module is open, and the userspace drivers remain closed-source. These are the recommended drivers for new Nvidia hardware. Nouveau drivers integrate with the rest of the Mesa stack, but have performance and power management issues.

I wonder whether something like this would be better:

Name Base NVIDIA Support ARM64 Support
silverblue-main-hardened Silverblue Poor (Nouveau) Beta
silverblue-nvidia-hardened Silverblue Yes, legacy closed module No
silverblue-nvidia-open-hardened Silverblue Yes, modern open module No

I know the Nvidia drop-down box says "No", "Yes (pre-Turing)" and "Yes (Turing and later)", but it might be hard to see how this maps to the Images page. Similarly, the download note refers to nvidia and nvidia-open, which isn't what appears in the drop-down box.

{% include alert.html type='note' content='<b>nvidia-open</b> images are recommended for systems with NVIDIA GPUs Turing or newer (GTX 16XX+, RTX 20XX+). Consult <a href="https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/CodeNames.html">this page</a> if you&#39;re not sure what family your GPU belongs to. These include the new <a href="https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules">open kernel modules</a> from NVIDIA, not Nouveau. <b>nvidia</b> images are recommended for systems with NVIDIA GPUs Pascal or older. These include the closed kernel modules from NVIDIA.' %}

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions