Nvidia pledge to help Linux's open source driver community

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This week, it seems, everything is coming up Linux. First Valve announce their own Linux-based OS , and now, Nvidia are making moves to get more involved with the open source community. Nvidia's Andy Ritger contacted the developers of Nouveau - an open source, reverse-engineered version of Nvidia's proprietary drivers - offering information on the workings of their GPUs.

In the first instance, that means releasing info on Nvidia's Device Control Block layout , which I'm not going to attempt to explain because I'm not a tech journalist. Ritger admits that "much of the information in that document is not news for the Nouveau community," but that the official explanation should help strengthen Nouveau's implementation.

Speaking to Ars Technica , Ritger outlined Nvidia's future plan, saying, "more BIOS-related information is in the pipeline."

"Our goal is for the Nouveau driver to give NVIDIA users a reasonable out-of-the-box experience," he continued, "This entails things like successful GPU initialization, display configuration, and basic 2D and 3D rendering. The DCB and other BIOS-related information will hopefully help improve some scenarios where Nouveau had initialization problems, or display enumeration sorts of challenges."

Nvidia has had an interesting relationship with Linux in the past. While its proprietary drivers are reasonable - by Linux proprietary driver standards - their reluctance to help the community prompted Linux creator Linus Torvalds to call them the "single worst company" that developers could work with.

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Phil Savage
Phil Savage
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Phil has been writing for PC Gamer for nearly a decade, starting out as a freelance writer covering everything from free games to MMOs. He eventually joined full-time as a news writer, before moving to the magazine to review immersive sims, RPGs and Hitman games. Now he leads PC Gamer's UK team, but still sometimes finds the time to write about his ongoing obsessions with Destiny 2, GTA Online and Apex Legends. When he's not levelling up battle passes, he's checking out the latest tactics game or dipping back into Guild Wars 2. He's largely responsible for the whole Tub Geralt thing, but still isn't sorry.