As a wonderful New Year surprise, there’s good momentum on NVIDIA graphics support for the BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system.
As reported on nearly one year ago, NVIDIA’s official open-source kernel modules were ported to Haiku although designed for their Linux kernel use. The Mesa NVK Vulkan driver was also being adapted to run atop the NVIDIA open-source modules as part of this effort for bettering the Haiku NVIDIA graphics driver support. In closing out 2025, NVIDIA-Haiku v0.0.1 driver packages are available that pair the NVIDIA open-source kernel modules (not the Nouveau kernel driver) with the NVK Vulkan driver as well as Mesa’s Zink driver for OpenGL-atop-Vulkan.
If it’s not clear enough from the v0.0.1 version number, this driver work is still very alpha quality and not yet integrated into Haiku proper. With using the NVIDIA open-source kernel modules, the NVIDIA hardware support is limited to Turing GPUs and newer due to the dependence on the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP).
The NVIDIA-Haiku driver sources are available via this GitHub repository. More details on the effort via this Haiku-OS.org thread.
Developer X512 who has been leading the effort also showed off some screenshots recently, including working NVIDIA graphics on this stack from a RISC-V SiFive HiFive Unmatched developer board paired with a NVIDIA graphics card.
