As of today, NVK is now a conformant Vulkan 1.3 implementation on Turing (RTX 2000 and GTX 1600 series), Ampere (RTX 3000 series), and Ada (RTX 4000 series) GPUs.
NVK is a new fully open source driver for Nvidia GPUs. Derived from documentation & official FOSS code drops from Nvidia, unlike the legacy Nouveau driver which was mostly the product of reverse engineering proprietary drivers.
NVK itself is not dependent on anything proprietary, but it’s practically required to enable NVIDIA’s GSP firmware blob if you want to see actual performance since it’s what enables re-clocking (older post by Collabora here which touches on it).
Slight correction, it’s available in Linux 6.7, and has to be enabled with the kernel parameter nouveau.config=NvGspRm=1. It may be enabled by default soon though (latest news I could find about that here).
Cool! I assume this this requires non-free binaries. Does anyone know specifics?
NVK is a new fully open source driver for Nvidia GPUs. Derived from documentation & official FOSS code drops from Nvidia, unlike the legacy Nouveau driver which was mostly the product of reverse engineering proprietary drivers.
NVK itself is not dependent on anything proprietary, but it’s practically required to enable NVIDIA’s GSP firmware blob if you want to see actual performance since it’s what enables re-clocking (older post by Collabora here which touches on it).
Is the GSP firmware included in
linux-firmwareyet?IIRC, yes, it will come starting with Linux 6.8
Slight correction, it’s available in Linux 6.7, and has to be enabled with the kernel parameter
nouveau.config=NvGspRm=1. It may be enabled by default soon though (latest news I could find about that here).Looking at the AUR package, it doesn’t look like there’s any binary dependencies: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/vulkan-nouveau-git?all_deps=1#pkgdeps