As announced earlier this month, NVIDIA 515.48.07 is the first stable version of NVIDIA’s graphics driver for UNIX systems to offer the source code to a variant of the NVIDIA Linux kernel modules. The source code is available here to tinkerers and has a dual license as MIT/GPLv2. For that, this release adds a new “kernelopen” feature tag to the supported-gpus.json file to indicate the NVIDIA GPUs that are compatible with open-gpu-kernel-modules.
The new version also brings several enhancements, such as support for the VK_EXT_external_memory_dma_buf and VK_EXT_image_drm_format_modifier Vulkan extensions, which requires the loading of the nvidia-drm kernel module with DRM KMS mode setting enabled, improved performance of GLX and Vulkan apps running in Gamescope, as well as improved Vulkan swapchain creation failure reporting.