Following AMD announcing the end of the AMDVLK Vulkan driver development in favor of focusing on the Mesa RADV driver for Linux systems, Red Hat engineer David Airlie who was one of the co-lead developers of the RADV driver shared some interesting insight on NVK as the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver being developed within Mesa.
With the success of AMD dropping AMDVLK in favor of the RADV driver in Mesa, David Airlie remarked that it’s onward now to “NVK victory 🙂” as this open-source Mesa Vulkan driver for NVIDIA driver for use atop the Nouveau kernel driver or Nova driver moving forward into the future.
In response to comments on the RADV milestone, Airlie commented on Mastodon an interesting bit:
“…for radv initially we just based it all off radeonsi the open source OpenGL driver and 10 years of experience with AMD hardware. No specs were really available. NVIDIA have been providing lots of info towards NVK under NDA with Red Hat, it’s how I enabled Blackwell support.”
Interesting to see NVIDIA is actively providing documentation under non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) to Red Hat engineers for helping with NVK development. Granted, having NDA-free NVIDIA hardware documentation would be ideal for open-source driver development…
Airlie also added:
“NVIDIA are getting friendlier, I don’t tend to punish companies for previous decisions if they are helping out more now. If they keep enabling NVK to happen, then I will keep trying to improve it to beat their proprietary driver.”
It will be interesting to see if/when NVK will be able to beat the official NVIDIA Vulkan proprietary driver. Granted, for that to happen the Nova kernel driver will likely first need to mature in overcoming the limitations of the existing Nouveau kernel driver. In any event it will be exciting to benchmark as NVK and Nova/Nouveau further mature against the official NVIDIA Linux graphics driver stack.
