Comment by puzzledobserver
6 years ago
I would expect a large fraction of Nvidia's GPU sales to be from customers wanting to do machine learning. What platform do these customers typically use? Windows?
How do the Linux and Windows drivers compare on matters related to CUDA?
Nvidia has a proprietary Linux driver that works just fine for GPGPU purposes. But because it's not GPLed, it will never be mainlined into the kernel, so you have to install it separately. This is in contrast to AMD GPUs, for which the driver lives in the Linux kernel itself.
Critically, Nvidia has a GPL'd shim. In the kernel code, which lets them keep a stable ABI. The kind of shim Linus isn't interested in for ZFS.
CUDA works fine, and I have found (completely non-rigorously) that a lot of the time where the workload is somewhat mixed between GPU and CPU you'll get better performance on Linux.
The _desktop_ situation is worse, though perfectly functional. But I boot into Windows when I want battery life and quiet fans on my laptop.