NVIDIA News Archives

In addition to NVIDIA announcing their Display Config Server project at XDC 2026 in Toronto, at this annual developer's conference they also presented their findings on scientific testing of X.Org vs. Wayland latency.

Back in August I wrote about NVIDIA working on Linux scheduler improvements for helping the SMT performance on their new Vera CPU with Olympus cores. That work remains ongoing but is looking fairly beneficial for performance especially for knocking it out in less than one hundred lines of code.

As an initiative from NVIDIA for improving the Linux ecosystem outside the world of AI, they have been developing Display-Config-Server as a new solution to help enhance the Linux capabilities for complex display walls.

NVIDIA today debuted the 615.71.09 Linux driver that comes with a number of improvements, especially from the Vulkan API perspective.

An interesting new open-source project for those looking to make use of NVIDIA DLSS 5 on Linux is DLSS5VKLayer. The DLSS5VKLayer is a Linux Vulkan layer that works for both native Linux games as well as Steam Play (Proton) Windows games for experimental DLSS 5 support.

NVIDIA continues building out more functionality around the open-source, upstream Nova kernel graphics driver within the Linux kernel. Making it out to the mailing list this Saturday is a set of 13 patches for introducing a NVIDIA vGPU manager and VFIO variant driver.

Following rumors in recent days of NVIDIA courting Hugging Face, it's now been officially announced that NVIDIA is acquiring Hugging Face.

Hitting the Linux kernel mailing list today is a new kernel scheduler patch series to enable preferred SMT siblings for NVIDIA Vera with its Olympus cores.

Firefox has finally begun supporting Vulkan Video decoding to complement their long-used VA-API support on Linux. This is good news for the official NVIDIA Linux graphics driver stack as it's been the notable vendor not supporting the Video Acceleration API. But prior to Firefox rolling out its experimental Vulkan Video support, an independent implementation of VA-API built atop NVIDIA's NVDEC interface has been available for supporting GPU video acceleration in Firefox. That project is out today with its newest release.

At the beginning of the year NVIDIA released a native build of GeForce NOW for Linux using Flatpaks. Today their native Linux build has exited beta to reach official production status for this cloud gaming solution from NVIDIA.

NVIDIA is kicking off the new month by releasing an updated R610 Linux driver build with quite a number of bug fixes.

NVIDIA and more than two dozen other companies have started the Open Secure AI Alliance for helping to keep open-source AI models secure. The other founding members range from Microsoft to Adobe, IBM, Red Hat, SpaceX, OpenClaw, Palantir, and others.

That didn't take long... Mere minutes after NVIDIA confirmed some basic Rosa CPU details and its "Rigel" CPU core, merged to the upstream GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) codebase is initial enablement on the NVIDIA Rigel core.

In a blog post today talking up the single threaded CPU performance of their Vera CPU with Olympus cores, NVIDIA confirmed a few basic details of their next-gen Rosa CPU featuring their "Rigel" core.

NVIDIA today published their latest stable driver update for Linux customers in their newest R610 release branch.

NVIDIA's latest Linux kernel mailing list patches are for providing the Device Tree for the baseboard management controller (BMC) of their Vera Rubin VR-NVL server platform. With the Linux kernel patches and also for U-Boot, it's part of the upstreaming effort for supporting the open-source OpenBMC software on their latest hardware.

NVIDIA engineers have been developing a new binary format for their GPU firmware images for use with the in-development, open-source Nova kernel driver. With this new TLV binary firmware format it aims to be easier to parse by their Rust-based driver code.

When going through the VFIO subsystem patches for the ongoing Linux 7.2 merge window, there isn't too much to get excited about for end users with these changes. But there is the first time mentioning "Blackwell-Next" enablement by NVIDIA for the Linux kernel.

Ahead of NVIDIA Vera ramping up, the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel is adding the ACPI CPPC v4 support authored by a NVIDIA engineer.

Last month CUDA-Oxide was introduced as an experimental Rust-to-CUDA compiler. From pure Rust programming language code, one can write CUDA GPU kernels in a "safe(ish)" manner with the CUDA-Oxide compiler emitting NVIDIA PTX output directly. Out today is the second update to CUDA-Oxide.

EGLStreams was NVIDIA's original route to supporting Wayland with their official Linux graphics driver stack. Adoption was limited and driver vendors outside of NVIDIA didn't end up going with EGLStreams/EGLDevice. Thankfully, NVIDIA corrected course long ago with DMA-BUF, GBM, and KMS support that aligns with the rest of the ecosystem, and now that old code path is being removed from GNOME Mutter.

While the upstream, open-source Nouveau driver already supports NVIDIA's Hopper and Blackwell graphics processors with the GPU System Processor (GSP) code path, the bring-up of the Rust-written Nova driver remains ongoing. Out this week is the 12th iteration of the Hopper and Blackwell enablement for this future open-source NVIDIA Linux driver.

An open-source developer has created NBD-VRAM as a way to create swap space on your consumer NVIDIA GPU's video memory under Linux.

Jensen Huang used his Computex keynote today to formally announce RTX Spark as their new superchip for compact desktop PCs and laptops.

NVIDIA on Tuesday released CUDA 13.3 as another significant advancement for their unified GPU programming stack for NVIDIA hardware.

NVIDIA is kicking off the new week with their first Linux driver beta in the R610 driver series that is succeeding the current R595 release branch.

DXVK-NVAPI 0.9.2 is now available for this implementation of NVIDIA's NVAPI/NVOFAPI interfaces atop DXVK and VKD3D-Proton that is used in turn by Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for enhanced NVIDIA Linux gaming support.

The open-source, community-developed NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver that provides a Video Acceleration API (VA-API) implementation built atop NVIDIA's NVDEC video decode interface is out with a new release. This is the open-source project that's motivated by getting accelerated video decoding to work within Mozilla Firefox and other apps when running with NVIDIA's packaged Linux driver.

A new NVIDIA Labs project is greatly improving the capabilities of using the Rust programming language for developing CUDA kernels for NVIDIA GPUs.

NVIDIA compiler engineers are looking to develop a standalone tool that could be upstreamed into the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) codebase for generating AutoFDO profiles for consumption by GCC in turn for better benefiting from automatic feedback directed optimizations (FDO) in the name of better performance.

NVIDIA on Friday released the 595.44.06 beta driver build as their newest Vulkan developer beta for Linux. This was joined by the NVIDIA 595.46 Windows Vulkan beta and there are performance improvements in tow and more work on their descriptor heaps support.

The legacy xf86-video-nv driver for user-space mode-setting on old NVIDIA GPUs is out with a rather rare release and the first in over two years with a collection of different bug fixes.

Last month we showcased GreenBoost as an open-source means of augmenting NVIDIA GPU vRAM with system RAM and NVMe storage. This memory tiering solution for NVIDIA GPUs was developed by an open-source developer with a focus on CUDA and allowing larger LLMs to be handled on graphics cards with smaller vRAM capacities. There was a setback to the project due to NVIDIA legal but now the project is going in new form and also has introduced GreenBoost-Proton for helping Linux gaming on NVIDIA hardware.

Last year NVIDIA announced the new CUDA Tile programming model as one of the biggest updates ever to the CUDA platform. CUDA Tile brings a virtual ISA for tile-based parallel programming and they subsequently open-sourced the CUDA Tile IR as an intermediate representation built atop LLVM's MLIR. Now they are looking to hire additional LLVM compiler engineers to help foster their CUDA Tile initiatives.

Following the DRM Color Pipeline API making it into the Linux 6.19 kernel, NVIDIA today released a preview Linux driver with their support for the DRM per-plane color pipeline API that will benefit the broader Linux/Wayland desktop HDR ambitions.

An important set of Linux scheduler patches were posted for review on Thursday for improving the SMT-aware asymmetric CPU capacity handling. These patches to improve the Linux kernel scheduler around CPU Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) is needed after NVIDIA engineers discovered up to a ~2x performance drop for CPU-intensive workloads on their upcoming Vera Rubin platform.

Building off the NVIDIA 595.45.04 Linux beta driver that brought DRI3 v1.2 support and new Vulkan capabilities, the NVIDIA 595.58.03 Linux driver released this morning as the first stable Linux driver build in the R595 release branch.

KubeCon Europe is running this week in Amsterdam and NVIDIA used the event to talk up their open-source work around AI and newest open-source contributions.

An interesting Linux detail from today's NVIDIA GTC 2026 kickoff is that Canonical will be integrating NVIDIA's DOCA-OFED software framework into the Ubuntu Linux archive for leveraging the high-speed networking stack for HPC and AI.

An open-source, independently developed Linux kernel module called GreenBoost aims to augment the dedicated video memory on NVIDIA discrete GPUs with system memory and NVMe storage. The intent here with GreenBoost is a CUDA caching layer to more easily run larger AI models for LLMs that otherwise won't fit solely in your graphics card's dedicated vRAM.

Less than a week after their prior NVIDIA Vulkan beta driver in the R595 driver series, today NVIDIA released another new Vulkan beta driver for Linux and Windows systems.

Last week NVIDIA released the 595.45.04 Linux driver beta as their first release in the R595 series for Linux and it's running very well in initial testing. Today as part of their Vulkan developer beta program, they have released the NVIDIA 595.44.02 driver that brings some new Vulkan API features.

With CUDA 13.2 that is now shipping, NVIDIA has provided official support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux compatible distributions/downstreams like AlmaLinux to CUDA. With this official NVIDIA CUDA support for these RHEL-compatible distributions, NVIDIA is also allowing the NVIDIA packages to be distributed directly from the OS package repositories.

Following the recent NVIDIA R595 driver release for Windows, NVIDIA today released the 595.45.04 driver for Linux users as a beta version in the R595 release stream.

One of the latest NVIDIA open-source contributions this week wasn't for the in-development Nova kernel driver but for enhancing the existing Nouveau kernel driver. The patch posted is for bringing up the NVIDIA GA100 GPU under Nouveau using the GPU System Processor (GSP).

A few months ago at SIGGRAPH was a demo of Blender with NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) integration. The pull request is now open for landing NVIDIA DLSS support into Blender for better quality upscaling/denoising and performance but concerns persist over the licensing due to NVIDIA DLSS binaries.

The NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver 0.0.15 was released overnight as this VA-API driver implementation built atop NVIDIA's NVDEC interface used by their proprietary user-space driver stack. The purpose of NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver as this community open-source project continues to be around enabling video acceleration for NVIDIA GPUs with the Firefox web browser on Linux that supports the VA-API interface but not NVIDIA's NVDEC.

As a wonderful New Year surprise, there's good momentum on NVIDIA graphics support for the BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system.

NVIDIA's Olympus are the ARM64 cores found within the upcoming Vera CPU that will be paired with Rubin. Olympus cores are claimed to be twice as fast as NVIDIA's current CPU cores found in Grace and based on Neoverse-V2. Earlier this year the open-source compilers landed initial support for Olympus while now a proper CPU scheduling model has been upstreamed into LLVM 22.

This year there was a lot of going on in the NVIDIA Linux world from their official driver stack seeing better Wayland support to a lot on the open-source scene from NVIDIA engineers contributing a lot directly to the Rust-based Nova open-source driver that continues taking shape, the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver becoming more performant and capable, and a lot of other happenings. Here is a look back at the most popular NVIDIA content of 2025 on Phoronix.