Last month, NVIDIA announced that the company will be releasing GPU kernel modules as open-source with a GPL/MIT license. The first stable version in the 515 series is released. NVIDIA 515.48.07 graphics driver for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris systems is available on GitHub and has a dual license.
Enhancements and changes
The NVIDIA 515.48.07 graphics driver is released with some enhancements, including support for the VK_EXT_external_memory_dma_buf and VK_EXT_image_drm_format_modifier Vulkan extensions, improved performance of GLX and Vulkan apps running in Gamescope, and better Vulkan swapchain creation failure reporting.
The driver also offers a new configuration option, allowing users to disable the DSO signature check, which is an NVIDIA X Server Settings app. It shows the quit confirmation dialog when there are pending changes that need manual intervention. Other changes are:
- Interlaced modes are now disabled when active stereo is enabled.
- Updated nvidia-installer to skip test-loading the kernel modules on systems where no supported NVIDIA GPUs are detected.
- Updated nvidia-installer to avoid a race condition which could cause the kernel module test load to fail due to udev automatically loading kernel modules leftover from an existing NVIDIA driver installation. This failure resulted in an installation error message “Kernel module load error: File exists”.
- Updated the RTD3 Video Memory Utilization Threshold (NVreg_DynamicPowerManagementVideoMemoryThreshold) maximum value from 200 MB to 1024 MB.
- Added a “kernelopen” feature tag to the supported-gpus.json file, to indicate which GPUs are compatible with open-gpu-kernel-modules.
- Improved Vulkan swapchain creation failure reporting. Applications can use the VK_EXT_debug_utils extension to receive additional information when an error was encountered in vkCreateSwapchainKHR().
- Fixed an issue where HDMI audio output was not working in some cases, especially with high display refresh rates (120 Hz, 100 Hz, etc.) using Fixed Rate Link (FRL) transmission mode.