this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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I don’t get what needs support, exactly. Maybe I’m not yet fully awake, which tends to make me stupid. But the graphics card doesn’t change. The driver translates OS commands to GPU commands, so if the target is not moving, changes can only be forced by changes to the OS, which puts the responsibility on the Kernel devs. What am I missing?
The driver needs to interface with the OS kernel which does change, so the driver needs updates. The old Nvidia driver is not open source or free software, so nobody other than Nvidia themselves can practically or legally do it. Nvidia could of course change that if they don't want to do even the bare minimum of maintenance.
That’s a false implication. The OS just needs to keep the interface to the kernel stable, just like it has to with every other piece of hardware or software. You don’t just double the current you send over USB and expect cable manufacturers to adapt. As the consumer of the API (which the driver is from the kernel’s point of view) you deal with what you get and don’t make demands to the API provider.
Device drivers are not like other software in at least one important way: They have access to and depend on kernel internals which are not visible to applications, and they need to be rebuilt when those change. Something as huge and complicated as a GPU driver depends on quite a lot of them. The kernel does not provide a stable binary interface for drivers so they will frequently need to be recompiled to work with new versions of linux, and then less frequently the source code also needs modification as things are changed, added to, and improved.
This is not unique to Linux, it's pretty normal. But it is a deliberate choice that its developers made, and people generally seem to think it was a good one.
That sounds like a stupid idea to me. But what do I know? I live in the ivory tower of application development where APIs are well-defined and stable.
Thanks for explaining.
You're re-opening the microkernel vs monlithic kernel debate with that. For fun you can read how Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Linus Torvalds debated the question in 1992 here: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.minix/c/wlhw16QWltI
Using 10 year old hardware with 10 year old drivers on 10 year old OS require no further work.
The hardware doesn't change, but the OS do.