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.