For those who came in late, in 2022 Nvidia started to support an open-sauce Linux GPU kernel driver based on its Turing architecture and newer. The company has been improving its open-source kernel driver support with the recent release of its R555 Linux driver series.

According to Nvidia, the open-source GPU kernel modules have helped deliver "equivalent or better" application performance compared to its proprietary kernels.

The company has also added new features to its open-source kernels, such as Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) support, confidential computing, and the coherent memory architectures of the Grace platform.

Nvidia believes that shifting away from proprietary software to open-source software was the right move that could help its GPUs deliver better performance across platforms.

Only select Nvidia GPUs are compatible with the open-source GPU kernel modules. This includes GPUs from the Grace Hopper and Blackwell platforms, which exclusively use open-source kernels. Proprietary drivers are unsupported on these platforms.

Other newer architectures like Turing, Ampere, Ada Lovelace, and Hopper support proprietary and open-source kernel modules. However, Nvidia recommends that users switch to open-source software for improved performance and reliability.

For compatible GPUs, the default version of the driver installed by all methods switches from proprietary to open-source. However, users can manually select the closed-source modules if they are still available for their platform.

Unfortunately, the open-source kernel modules are not available for GPUs from the older Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures. This means people still running a GTX 980 or GTX 1080 will have to continue using Nvidia's proprietary drivers.

For mixed deployments with older and newer GPUs in the same system, Nvidia recommends using the proprietary driver for full compatibility.

Nvidia aims to fully transition with the R560 drivers, and the company has already released its first driver from this branch for Windows. While it's still unavailable for Linux it is expected to arrive soon.