NVIDIA Company published stable release of a new branch of the proprietary driver NVIDIA 550.54.14. The driver is available for Linux (ARM64, x86_64), FreeBSD (x86_64) and Solaris (x86_64). NVIDIA 545.x became the sixth stable branch after NVIDIA opened components running at the kernel level. Thanks for reading texts of the nvidia.ko, nvidia-drm.ko (Direct Rendering Manager), nvidia-modeset.ko and nvidia-uvm.ko (Unified Video Memory) kernel modules from the new NVIDIA branch, as well as common components used in them, not tied to the operating system, posted on GitHub. The firmware and libraries used in user space, such as CUDA, OpenGL and Vulkan stacks, remain proprietary.
Main innovations:
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- Support for Vulkan extensions VK_KHR_video_encode_queue, VK_KHR_video_encode_h264, VK_KHR_video_encode_h265 and VK_KHR_video_maintenance1, used to speed up video encoding, has been implemented.
- Added an application profile to improve the performance of the Kwin composite manager on systems with hybrid graphics (enabled via OGL_DEDICATED_HW_STATE_PER_CONTEXT=ENABLE_ROBUST).
- The contents of the INSTALL_MOD_DIR environment variable have been added to the process of building kernel modules.
- Added support for GBM (Generic Buffer Management) R8, GR88 and YCbCr formats.
- The mechanism for limiting the frame rate when launching the X driver in headless mode has been improved. For X11 systems, a “LimitFrameRateWhenHeadless” setting has been added, which allows you to disable FPS limitation when working without a screen.
- Added experimental support for HDMI with 10 bits per color channel (enabled via the “hdmi_deepcolor=1” parameter when loading the nvidia-modeset module).
- Added support for passing HDR information through the DRM property HDR_OUTPUT_METADATA when loading the nvidia-drm module with the “modeset=1” parameter.
- Vulkan Wayland WSI (Window System Integration) has added support for PRIME technology for offloading rendering operations to other GPUs (PRIME Render Offload).
- For the KMS (Kernel Mode Setting) mechanism, support for the CRTC (CRT Controller) CTM, DEGAMMA_LUT and GAMMA_LUT properties, necessary for implementing night mode in the GNOME and KDE environments using the Wayland protocol, has been implemented.
- Open kernel modules provide support for GeForce and Workstation series GPUs.
- Added experimental support for RTD3 (Runtime D3) dynamic power management mechanism on PC GPUs.
- Added support for the EGL extension EGL_ANDROID_native_fence_sync, as well as Vulkan extensions VK_EXTERNAL_SEMAPHORE_HANDLE_TYPE_SYNC_FD_BIT and VK_EXTERNAL_FENCE_HANDLE_TYPE_SYNC_FD_BIT, available when loading the nvidia-drm kernel module with the “modeset=1” parameter.
- Changed the names of NVIDIA devices shown in /proc/devices (from nvidia-frontend to nvidia and nvidiactl).
- The nvidia-drm module includes experimental support for framebuffer-based consoles that can be used on Linux in place of the native boot console provided by drivers such as efifb and vesafb. Console support in nvidia-drm is enabled when the module is loaded with the parameters “modeset=1” and “fbdev=1”.
- The nvidia-installer installer now has the ability to install a new driver if there is an NVIDIA driver already loaded on the system.
- For composite servers based on the Wayland protocol that support the “DRM leasing” mode, support for virtual reality headsets, such as SteamVR, has been added. To work, you need to have versions of wayland-protocols 1.22+ and xwayland 22.1.0+. The work has been tested with composite servers Kwin 5.24 and Sway 1.7.
- The NVIDIA VDPAU driver for Xwayland has been added to provide support for the VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation) API for X11 applications launched using Xwayland.
- The libnvidia-gpucomp.so library is included, used for compiling shaders.
- Removed libnvidia-vulkan-producer.so library, which is no longer required in Wayland WSI (Window System Integration).
- Support has been added to open kernel modules vGPU on the side of the host environment and guest systems.
- Problems that led to a significant slowdown in output (less than 1 FPS) in Wayland applications on systems with GPUs of the Maxwell, Volta, and Pascal series have been resolved.
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