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I came here to say that. This isn't an NVIDIA commitment to open source; it is a slap in the face. Rather than open sourcing the drivers, they are patching the kernel to fit the needs of their proprietary driver. Note that I'm not against proprietary software, however, title of this post was super misleading and NVIDIA needs to grow up and work on an open-source driver. The world will NOT change for them.


The world doesn't need to change for them. They already have successful closed source drivers.

You're right that this isn't about nVidia suddenly deciding to open source anything, but it's still good for compatibility reasons.



It’s not actually a driver. Note comments like “Initialize driver-specific stuff” in the code.

Mesa refers to https://docs.mesa3d.org/systems.html and Vulkan refers to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulkan

To quote the linked blog post:

> This blog post will be a tutorial of sorts (we won't have a functioning Vulkan driver in the end, sorry)

> First off, every driver needs a name. We're not actually writing one here but it'll make the examples easier if we pretend we are. Just for the sake of example, I'm going to pick on NVIDIA because... Why not? Such a driver is clearly missing and really should happen soon. (Hint! Hint!) We're going to call this hypothetical new Vulkan driver NVK.

That said… NVIDIA did release a Vulkan driver in January 2022 which supports Vulkan 1.3 so… this blog post is slightly outdated. But it certainly does not include or reference work on an actual NVIDIA driver.


The blog post is about writing a Vulkan driver inside Mesa. Nvidia's blob driver does not count here.




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