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Improving NVIDIA support

AstrOS has had NVIDIA driver support for a pretty long time. In fact, it was 16 days after the first commit was pushed to our repo.

AstrOS uses open kernel modules NVIDIA drivers that are manually enabled via a system extension. We still do not support the fully closed, proprietary NVIDIA drivers, and that won’t change.

However, this presented two problems. First, nvidia-open only supports Turing and later, so users with older cards would have a hard time using AstrOS. Second, users had to install the NVIDIA system extension with no GPU driver loaded, which left the system running at around 2-10 fps during the process.

That’s why we now include the NVK drivers in the base image. Every NVIDIA user with a Kepler or newer GPU will boot into Nouveau + NVK after installing AstrOS. This lets us support many more GPUs: owners of pre-Turing cards get a working driver out of the box, and Turing and newer get a smooth experience right away, whether they stick with NVK or choose to switch to the nvidia-open drivers later. However, we strongly recommend using the nvidia-open drivers, when supported, to take full advantage of your GPU’s performance. One user reported 160 fps with NVK compared to 400 fps with nvidia-open in Minecraft. (RTX 3050)

All of this is now documented on a dedicated page in our documentation.

AstrOS is now on Fluxer

Over the past few months, Discord has repeatedly faced criticism regarding age verification. As a result, multiple open-source alternatives have emerged. The most similar one being Fluxer.

It didn’t take long for several major Linux projects to adopt it. Well-known projects like Debian and the unofficial Arch Linux community server already have their Fluxer communities, making Fluxer a real contender.

Given that many serious projects are now using Fluxer, making it a real alternative, we believe that it is the right direction for AstrOS as well.

So AstrOS now has a Fluxer server.

However, we are still a relatively small project, and the last thing we want is to fragment our users. This is where Fluxcord comes in. It’s an open-source bot for bridging channels between Fluxer and Discord. It allows our users to decide which platform they prefer without missing out on what’s happening on the other.

Our Discord server won’t be going anywhere soon. Over time, though, we will slowly prioritize the Fluxer server as the first class place to get support for AstrOS.

Our Fluxer is linked everywhere you find our socials :)

Breaking Change: Secure Boot - now with optional Microsoft key enrollment

systemd-boot menu

From the beginning, AstrOS has shipped its own custom Secure Boot keys.

Until now, every device that wanted Secure Boot was required to enroll only our custom keys in the firmware. This prevented the use of Secure Boot on devices whose option ROMs were signed by Microsoft. As a result, many devices were unable to use Secure Boot with AstrOS at all. This has changed.

We now ship two prepared key sets under /boot/loader/keys/.

astros: just as before, containing only our certificates and nothing else.

astros+microsoft: containing our certificate plus Microsoft’s certificates added to KEK and db alongside ours.

Note that this doesn’t mean our boot chain is now signed by Microsoft. It only allows the firmware to boot Microsoft-signed software / option ROMs.

The user can choose which to enroll when booting from Setup Mode.

Learn more on our Secure Boot page.

We now have a blog site

We now have a blog site! To make sure you don’t miss the latest AstrOS news, subscribe to our RSS feed.

Note: I’ve ported over the most important blogs from Reddit.