Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver

Oh wow the comments on Phoronix for this one are bonkers.

From what I understand (because it wasn't clear to me from either of the TLDRs posted here) Nvidia's proprietary graphics driver has been calling parts of the kernel that they shouldn't be, because their driver is closed source.

These seem to be parts of the kernel that another company may own patents to, but has only licensed it to the kernel for free use with GPL open source code only, i.e. closed source/proprietary code is not allowed to use it.

Nvidia seems to have open sourced a tiny communication shim to try and bypass this restriction, so their closed source driver talks to the shim, and the shim talks to the restricted code in the kernel, that Nvidia does not have a license to use. This is a DMCA violation, hence why the Kernel devs are putting in preventions to block the shim, as far as I can see.

I don't understand the small minority of commenters there defending a la soulless corp Nvidia, who is blatantly in the wrong here. Some commenters have gone as far as to call the Linux kernel maintainers "zealots", would not be surprised if they are alts for Nvidia devs...

Edit: typo

Then isn't the correct solution to sue Nvidia?
It's a legal issue with a legal solution.
- You dont sue someone with deeper pockets than you.
- Yeah probably, but Nvidia can afford lawyers and delays for years. Much longer than any oss group could afford
- So you want the company that licensed the patents to the Linux kernel for open source use to have to sue Nvidia for wrongly using their code? You want the company to have to spend a bunch of money suing Nvidia and possibly lose which would open the flood gates to more closed source code leeching off the Linux kernel?
  Yeah that's going to make them want to keep licensing their IP to the Linux Foundation (which they're probably doing for free).
  Or the maintainers can just submit a fairly simple patch to ensure that the kernel and the patents are being respected. Do you really think the first approach is the way to go?
- Because sueing is never great
- apparently suing in these cases would mean having authorization from ALL contributors...
Just a perspective on why people would support NVIDIA here:
They don't believe in copyright law so they don't mind whoever infringe on them. Especially since here it would make the proprietary driver work better.
They do care about copyright law but think having a working driver outweighs respecting them.
Not my opinion here just saying that for some people usability trumps any other aspects.
- They don't believe in copyright law so they don't mind whoever infringe on them. Especially since here it would make the proprietary driver work better.
  I don't believe in copyright law, but I especially don't believe in partially enforced copyright law. Nvidia doesn't get to use copyright to protect their proprietary code while infringing on the copyright of FOSS.
- Good read. I think the root is simply, don’t care about the rights of others if it is going to cost them something personally.
Phoronix comments are always wild
- Remind me of those who supports Red Hat for blocking sources and telling those who downstreams "code thief with no contribution to open source" lol.
I don’t understand the small minority of commenters there defending a la soulless corp Nvidia, who is blatantly in the wrong here.
They think they're gonna get a free 4090 in the mail any day now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ
"I'm also very happy to point out that nVidia has been the worst [...] so nVidia, "fuck you!""
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Agree with your analysis, just pointing out that Phoronix forums have always been like this, or at least the tendency is to insult each other. Their culture is more toxic than any other Linux forums I've seen, maybe besides /g/.
I need to upgrade my computer soon.... this crap makes me not want to go Nvidia again. (Running a looooong in the tooth 1060.)
- The new 150$ range Amd cards are enticing. I could bring new life into my rx5500 htpc.
Thanks for the ELI5. I read the article but had a hard time parsing the significance other than Nvidia proprietary drivers bad
But why is it a problem if they call on parts of the kernal they shouldn't? is it just a privacy concern, does it also impact performance? i don't understand
- As the commenter stated, it is a copyright issue. Nvidia is not allowed to use this code in a proprietary driver.
- It is copyright infringement. Nvidia (and everyone writing kernel modules) has to choose between:
  using the GPL-covered parts of the kernel interface and sharing their own source code under the GPL (a free software license)
  not using the GPL-covered parts of the kernel interface
  Remember that the kernel is maintained by volunteers and by engineers funded by/working for many companies, including Nvidia's direct competitors, and Nvidia is worth billions of dollars. Nvidia is incredibly obnoxious to infringe on the kernel's copyright. To me it is 100% the appropriate response to show them zero tolerance for their copyright infringement.
- Because the license for the patents that the Linux kernel is utilizing says that the code utilizing those patents must be open source. So therefore Nvidia is accessing those parts of the kernel illegally and against the license the Linux Foundation has. The Linux Foundation could lose the rights to use those patents if they're not respecting the license.
- Cause the GPL is a virus
If it's a dmca violation then sue them. Do not create software "defenses" and do not make my computer experience worse.
- With what money are they supposed to fight the multi billion dollar mega corpo exactly with dozens of lawyers??
  Also, if they fight this in court then that would mean less money for development thus making your experience even worse….
Because we don’t care about open source drama, we want an operating system that just works™ with our existing graphics cards and doesn’t get in the way of gaming.
- Then let Nvidia deal with this drama of their own making. Linux works as intended.
- From a legal perspective, nvidia has been illegally bypassing a software license by exploiting a loophole. Linux devs fixed the loophole.
  I don't see why I would be annoyed at Linux devs in these circumstances.
- Then go install Windows.
- If that is the case, then you should be very happy to leave Linux for a proprietary OS that Nvidia works on and properly supports.
- It's not going to effect 99% of users. Nvidia will update it as they have in the past. The large majority of distros use stable kernels by default, and it will be fixed before this makes it to one. You're getting upset over something completely irrelevant to you.
- This thing exists.
  But you have to pay for it.
  Otherwise you might have to deal with the wishes of the people you aren’t paying.
- Okay, then continue not caring as the people who do take care of things. Don't worry your pretty little head about it.

Riddle me this, why is there such a thing as proprietary drivers for anything? Especially consumer facing products like this?

Don't you want anyone and anything using your product in any situation? Help me understand NVIDIA's bit with this?

Driver code might expose some underlying secret sauce they're using in the hardware. That's the justification they always used to give, at any rate. At this point, though, it's probably some code they've inherited from an acquisition that has a bunch of legal encumbrance stopping it from being open sources.
- If they have to rely on obscuring stuff on their user side to keep their secret sauce, I'd say they're bad at it.
  This is coming from someone who deals with APIs for living.
Likely a combination of 4 things:
They have third party firmware in their blobs that they are under NDA regarding the source code.
They believe in the source code is a large part of their success and don't want to reveal it.
They believe giving out the source code will allow many inferior variants of the software, impacting their brand.
Control; the more source code they have in mesa the more of their code can be rejected by mesa. Keeping their stuff as blobs allows them to put in whatever hacks they want.
- They can open their code without merging into mesa
  They don't want you to use "old" GPUs
I assume nVidia have licensed other code that they don't have the rights to distribute the source code for.
I get what the GPL fans want here, but it's just going to lead to a gimped driver, no driver, or an even larger shim between the open and closed source bits. The Linux market is too small for nVidia to care.
- The Linux market is too small for nVidia to care.
  The Linux gaming market is too small for Nvidia to care, but the GPU computing market isn't.
- The Linux market is massive for Nvidia. Nobody is using Windows for ML and everybody is using Nvidia for ML.
- The Linux community is literally Nvidia's biggest market. The current Linux market share in data centers is currently estimated to be 77%.
- All ml, ai, hpc is done on Linux. They are getting a lot of money because of the hype.
  They need Linux drivers. No way hpc can be done on windows. But it can be done on amd
- With GPUs being used for AI stuff and all sane people using Linux for servers, no, Linux market isn't small at all for Nvidia.
- That’s all I see happening too. The Nvidia Linux drivers will just get worse and not solve anything.
  It’s already a huge pain in the ass to use the proprietary drivers, the open source ones barely work as is.
- The Linux market is too small for nVidia to care
  I'll fix it for you: "The Linux gaming market"
  Linux AI market is their bread, butter and red caviar. Shim itself is enough proof they care.
They don't want you to see the "if benchmark_xyz { do less work }" blocks of code.

And that's why I'm happy to see that the lock on modifying the Nvidia BIOS for their old graphics cards has finally been decrypted. That means that Nouveau will have a much easier route to make their open-source drivers work properly on the 10xx and 20xx cards, so we don't have to rely on the tainted crumbs that Nvidia offered here. (Then again, I eventually moved to a 6600 specifically to no longer have to deal with this kind of shenanigans)

Man, that would be so nice. I forgot actually for a while that I was using Nouveau after I switched cause nvidia-dkms wouldn't let me boot (1050ti). The only thing that reminds me is game performance. Wayland is great though.

Perfect timing buying an AMD card yesterday to replace my old NVidia. Installed today, works like a champ. Issue resolved

I've had a mixed experience with my newer AMD card, and that's being charitable.
- What were some of the positives and negatives? Me personally, I have an RDNA2 card and got bitten by the gamma being too dark on hardware cursors (now resolved) and memory clock stuck at 1 GHz with some refresh rates (workaround is not to use refresh above ~144 Hz).
- To be fair AMD closed-source drivers were much worse
- There's been some oddball nasty issues with Mesa recently. SteamVR causing the driver to crash (and the display just won't come back :/) H265 encoding causing driver crashing, just weird stuff. Simple things like Wayland work great, but if you have even a slightly unique workload you may run into major issues

a) Good for them

b) How long before NVIDIA throws up their hands at the whole thing and does their own Linux distro + pushes all their cloud AI customers to use it? (it doesn't seem like they're ever going to be shamed / coerced into actually open-sourcing their driver)

Would having their own distro even help? It seems like working around this would require forking from Linux at a lower level, and even that would only circumvent technical (rather than copyright) barriers.
- They can probably just drop some kernel packages in their driver PPAs or whatever. You don't need to fork the whole distro to customize the kernel. But it will still be a huge pain.
- They can beef of linux support of freebsd a little and do some other help to the desktop experience there. Freebsd has always been more pragmatic, and for most uses of an os you can't tell a real world difference. (pkg instead of apt, and other such differences are minor)
There's an interesting discussion about the whole topic on the Phoronix forums about this. Some people claim that removing them and Nvidia's current behavior is a DMCA violation:
The kernel includes IP only licensed under GPLv2.
While a module linked against the kernel isn't necessarily a derived work which in turn would need to be licensed GPLv2 as well, there are specific interfaces that are meant for internal use and by their very nature would make your work derived if using them. These are the interfaces marked EXPORT_GPL_ONLY.
Using these interfaces with a module not licensed GPLv2, you taint the kernel and violate the licensing.
Removing the check, you aren't necessarily yet violating GPLv2, but you're removing a technical protection measure which is a violation of the DMCA.
It also raises the question why you'd remove checks that only prevent a possible GPLv2 violation if you're not violating GPLv2 anyways as Nvidia claims.
- you aren't necessarily yet violating GPLv2, but you're removing a technical protection measure which is a violation of the DMCA.
  Isn't overcoming a technical limit a violation itself? That's what made DeCSS illegal. They didn't have to prove anyone was actually copying DVDs with it, just that DeCSS could allow you to copy a DVD
B) can't happen because of gpl. Even if it could, not many customers will move to an nvidia distro. ML people need good distros and good drivers.
If a hypothetical nvidia distro would speed up training by 10% but cause drop of productivity of humans of as small as 5%, no many will "buy" it. We can throw more hardware, people are the bottleneck nowadays
Not to be contrarian, but b) could well be a full decade of work and numerous individual projects
They already provide custom images for their Jetson modules, I think more NVIDIA distros are likely to happen one way or another.

That's just such a great image!

Made me lol
Yeah they'd do that with a card that looks like it's from 2003 with those classic dual DVI ports. Stole it right out of some kid's Quake 3 box. Try that with a 4090.
- Give the gigantic heatsink, that might actually work just fine. The PCI brackets are just stamped aluminium after all.

What ever happened to the source code nvidia did release. Was it released in such a way to where it is not helpful?

They are not legally allowed to build drivers from the illegally acquired source code.
- couldnt they do the thing where one team analyzes the leaked code and documents functions.
  and a nother, clean room team, creates independent fresh code to achieve the same results as the original?
  I mean, clean room activity like that has a strong precedent, going back to EA vs Sega at least. where EA stole a sega genesis dev kit, had one team document the functions, had another team independently create code to execute those functions,and made their own dev kid and put out non-approved sega carts (which is why the EA sega carts were taller and had the yellow plastic tag)
  Sega sued and EA won due the clean room engineering and sega and EA came to some kind of sweetheart deal/comrpromise/settlement.
- I don't think they meant the hacked and released source code, I think they meant the kernel modules that Nvidia actually opensourced in may of '22
That's only for never generation cards, from 20xx series upwards I think.
But there's still the proprietary driver for everything before that, including 1080 and such.
I belive the NVK work is where that headed. The released code wasn't up to snuff for true kernel intergration on it own, but offered a lot of insights for devs working on the problem.

Lousy criminals. NVIDIA, I mean. If I wrote code like that, I'd be dragged in front of a judge and made to answer for breaking the DMCA. But if you're a big, rich company, the government won't touch you.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The Linux 6.6 modules infrastructure is changing to better protect against the illicit behavior of NVIDIA's proprietary kernel driver.

Most notable with the modules update is a change that better builds up the defenses against NVIDIA's proprietary kernel driver from using GPL-only symbols.

Given that symbol_get was only ever intended for tightly cooperating modules using very internal symbols it is logical to restrict it to being used on EXPORY_SYMBOL_GPL and prevent nvidia from costly DMCA circumvention of access controls lawsuits.

Luis Chamberlain further added in today's pull request: "Christoph Hellwig's symbol_get() fix to Nvidia's efforts to circumvent the protection he put in place in year 2020 to prevent proprietary modules from using GPL only symbols, and also ensuring proprietary modules which export symbols grandfather their taint.

The circumvention tactic used by Nvidia was to use symbol_get() to purposely swift through proprietary module symbols and completley bypass our traditional EXPORT_SYMBOL*() annotations and community agreed upon restrictions."

Back in 2020 when the original defense was added, NVIDIA recommended avoiding the Linux 5.9 for the time being.

The original article contains 476 words, the summary contains 174 words. Saved 63%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

So what does that mean for me on Arch, how will it affect me?

ELI5?

If they don't fix it before 6.6 comes out on Arch, you may have to use the LTS kernel.
I don't use arch but I would guess you should avoid kernel 6.6 if you are using an nvidia card until we get more info about that.

It seems they just fixed symbol_get() so GPL-only symbols are avaliable to GPL driver

Phoronix thinks I'm using ad blocker. In fact I'm not. I don't have any kind of adblocker on my network... sigh

Meanwhile me using ublock adblocker and flawlessly reading the content on firefox
Which browser are you using? Perhaps it has some built in blocking
- Firefox 102.14.0esr.

Can someone ELI5 what this is about? Why does Nvidia wants to access parts if the Linux kernel and why are linux kernel maintainers against it? Wouldn't it be good if Nvidia uses more open-source stuff?

Open source software is given with specific licenses. The Linux kernel is made of many smaller open-source components that each can have their own license. Some of the licenses used disallow the partial or full usage of the licensed software or components in proprietary settings, or in general given usage for specific cases only (in this case, the Nvidia driver using components they are not licensed to use.).

I get why the Linux folks are doing this, but I don't expect that it will make them popular with anyone who actually uses Nvidia drivers on Linux (which is a lot of people). I'm sure that my employer will choose up-to-date Nvidia drivers over up-to-date versions of the kernel, at least in the short term. In the long term it probably won't be an issue since Nvidia will figure something out, but if it did become an issue then ultimately Nvidia driver support is non-negotiable for the company where I work.

(No one cares what a small tech company does, but the big guys need Nvidia too so it should be possible to piggyback on whatever they do.)

don’t expect that it will make them popular with anyone who actually uses Nvidia drivers on Linux
The group to be annoyed at are Nvidia. Plain and simple.
- For most people, principle takes a backseat to pragmatics. If your livelihood is training ML models on thousands of nVidia cards or whatever, you care less about who to be mad at and more about not laying off your staff and shutting the doors. You can't replace nVidia. You can replace the latest kernel.
- From my closed-source corporate perspective, Nvidia is trying to improve performance and the Linux kernel maintainers are trying to stop them. I don't see why I would be annoyed at Nvidia in these circumstances.
I think end users wouldn't care either, they probably wouldn't even understand what's actually happening, they'll only notice performance degrading (if this is the case) and blame Linux for it.
That's not to say this shouldn't be done, I just wish there was better control on license violations and those doing it on purpose, like Nvidia in this case, would be seriously punished to make them think twice next time.
I use Nvidia drivers on Linux and fully support it. You know what else is non-negotiable? Linux support for Nvidia. Huge chunk of their money comes from people using their GPUs on Linux for machine learning. And while they can use older kernels for now (because they're still supported), they won't be able to forever. And corporates will want a supported OS with their Nvidia card.
- And while they can use older kernels for now (because they're still supported), they won't be able to forever.
  It might even happen that the change gets back ported upstream; that would mean that every supported kernel has the changes in place, regardless of version.

I use Nvidia's proprietary driver because the open-source Nouveau driver won't work with my display. Will this update break the driver, or just make it slower?

I'd love to stop using Nvidia, but I don't have much choice about using their proprietary driver until I get my next video card, or Nouveau starts working for me.

It probably means it'll take longer for Nvidia to release a driver for Linux 6.6 and might stop them from doing so. They'll probably find a way to circumvent this and continue to violate the GPLv2 the kernel is licensed under.
If your on a distro which gets a new kernel quickly it might be a good idea to pin Linux 6.5 so the system doesn't update to a kernel which the driver doesn't support. But whether that's necessary woll probably be talked about more once 6.6 actually releases.
PS: If your on a 2000 series or later GPU you might actually be able to use nouveau at some point, since there's ongoing work on an open source Vulkan driver with actually useable performance. Thanks to Nvidia it definitely won't work on Pascal and earlier.

Just installed the nvidia-driver for my 2080 SUPER and my system isn't starting now. I'm using Debian 12.1 and after installing the driver, it crashes after entering in my password for my encrypted drive.

I will load up a Live USB and see if I can fix the issue. Any help would be appreciated!

That's unrelated to this.
Blacklist the Nvidia driver and un-blacklist nouveau. I'm going from memory, but I think if you can get to GRUB, you can append 'single' to your kernel parameters. That should get you into a system with minimal drivers loaded.
Noveau supports 2080 since 2019.
https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/FeatureMatrix.html
- Nouveau is slow

TAINT_PROPRIETARY_MODULE & GPL Condom has to be intentional double entendre right?

Yeah, you're just running an entirely proprietary GPU that only Apple makes proprietary drivers for. Don't see how that's a win in any way?
- Apple's GPU at least isn't maliciously designed to be difficult to write open-source drivers for. It's up to the community to figure out how it works and write a driver, but Apple isn't actively trying to stop them like NVIDIA is.
Apple reserves the sole and exclusive right to that privilege.

Intentionally pushing changes that could brick a bunch of systems over legal complaints is imo reckless.

This should be a last resort move. Has the Linux foundation started chasing nVidia over this? because it sounds like this is coming out of nowhere.

Get pissed at NVIDIA. They're the problem.
But when NVIDIA or gamedevs do it, it is different.

I’d rather have working proprietary drivers than broken open source ones, which seem to be our only options. I find it real hard to side with Linux here as they’re going to make performance worse for a platform that already struggles.

And people wonder why Linux will never take off on the desktop. Stuff as basic as this will make sure anyone semi-casual about pc use will have issues with Linux.

Or maybe we shouldn't just accept trillion dollar companies doing whatever the fuck they want?
Nvidia is clearly on the wrong here, and infringing on copyright. Do you want to set the precedent that companies can just ignore copyright? Meanwhile when we certainly can't ignore theirs?
Maybe we should hold the companies to a higher standard. And not roll over and give in basically as soon as they do something we don't like, compromising the foundation and good parts of what we already have, in this case Linux. Open source and GPL is the lifeblood of Linux, it's what makes it as good and useful as it is.
Or maybe to keep doing social pressure on nvidia and make them feel guilty ,that they finally realse and did support of open version drivers not only for gtx 1650+ and fot more old cards.Because their source codes was published when hackers hacked their infrastructure and leaked source code.
Just the existence of CUDA means Linux must remain a target for Nvidia.
Also, this can be quite easily compared to Windows changing their driver's structure and functionality. And Microsoft did it many times in the past.

It's sad to see the 100500th confrontation between the people who have never contributed to the kernel, yet they want to deprive others of using their existing GPU with Linux and instead force them to buy a new GPU. This screams of of being elitist and haughty but I just don't care any longer. Too tired of hatred, aggression, animosity and verbal attacks. This has really propelled Linux, oh, wait, it's only shown what kind of people represent Open Source.

Those “haughty” “elitists” wrote your operating system and gave it to you for free. Have some gratitude, and direct your complaints to the uncooperative scoundrels in charge of NVIDIA who created this whole problem.
Will someone please think of the mega corporation. 😢
It's kind of like using DRM to combat piracy in regards to multimedia. The Linux kernel is under a certain license and the kernel developers feel NVidia is encroaching on their IP in a way that is against the copyright. They won't give NVidia an exemption despite their obvious importance in the hardware industry.
It may seem aggressive but look at how Nintendo, Disney, etc. regard those who break their own plans/trademarks. If you don't take your own IP seriously, the law won't either.
- DRM is a good comparison, imagine there exists a DRM measure that doesn't affect rightful owners in any way shape or form but prevents piracy, would you be against it?
  Personally I would be 100% okay with that, the problem is that DRM usually causes issues to rightful users and doesn't prevent piracy. This change on the Kernel seems to be that perfect DRM, it won't affect any rightful driver but prevents companies from pirating the Linux Kernel.
Dude are you Avis from the phoronix forums¿? This comment is the exact copy of his/her comment there.