section_path: Open-source software support
section_name: Open-source software support
paragraph_text: Open-source software support
  
  Until September 23, 2013, Nvidia had not published any documentation for its advanced hardware, meaning that programmers could not write free and open-source device driver for its products without resorting to reverse engineering.
  
  Instead, Nvidia provides its own binary GeForce graphics drivers for X.Org and an open-source library that interfaces with the Linux, FreeBSD or Solaris kernels and the proprietary graphics software. Nvidia also provided but stopped supporting an obfuscated open-source driver that only supports two-dimensional hardware acceleration and ships with the X.Org distribution.
  
  The proprietary nature of Nvidia's drivers has generated dissatisfaction within free-software communities. In a 2012 talk, Linus Torvalds, in criticism of Nvidia's approach towards Linux, raised his middle finger and stated "Nvidia, fuck you." Some Linux and BSD users insist on using only open-source drivers and regard Nvidia's insistence on providing nothing more than a binary-only driver as inadequate, given that competing manufacturers such as Intel offer support and documentation for open-source developers and that others (like AMD) release partial documentation and provide some active development.
  
  Nvidia only provides x86/x64 and ARMv7-A versions of their proprietary driver; as a result, features like CUDA are unavailable on other platforms. Some users claim that Nvidia's Linux drivers impose artificial restrictions, like limiting the number of monitors that can be used at the same time, but the company has not commented on these accusations.
  
  In 2014, with Maxwell GPUs, Nvidia started to require firmware by them to unlock all features of its graphics cards.
  
  On May 12, 2022, Nvidia announced that they are opensourcing their GPU kernel modules. Support for Nvidia's firmware was implemented in nouveau in 2023, which allows proper power management and GPU reclocking for Turing and newer graphics card generations.