Ben Skeggs at Red Hat has long been the primary Nouveau DRM kernel driver maintainer for keeping this open-source NVIDIA GPU kernel driver within the mainline kernel going… Throughout all the battles, particularly after the GTX 900 series and later has required signed firmware images for enabling any accelerated GPU support, he’s now resigning from maintaining the driver. Ben Skeggs has contributed to the Nouveau project for more than one dedace – he’s earned references on Phoronix since 2008.
The state of GPUs on Linux:
- Want to game: choose AMD,
- Want to do ML/scientific computing: choose NVIDIA,
- Want to do both: fuck you!
AMD is getting better for ML/scientific computing very fast for the regular consumer GPUs. I have seen the pytorch performance more than double on my 6700xt in 6 months to the point that it has better performance than a 3060(not ti).
Great to know, but unfortunately CUDA is still too entrenched in comparison to OpenCL - hopefully there’s some way to convert from one to the other.
OpenCL is dead. Vulkan is the future.
We still need core libraries to be written as Vulkan compute shaders, similar to cuFFT and cuDNN.
There is VkFFT, but I don’t know how good it is. I don’t think anyone has written a VkDNN library.
NVIDIA has signaled that they will fully support Vulkan.
