Google Stadia Linux kernel is exposed to add support for NVIDIA drivers

Google Stadia Linux kernel is exposed to add support for NVIDIA drivers.

Since its launch in 2019, Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service has relied on custom Vega-based GPUs in its Linux servers. But now, the company appears to be quietly transitioning to NVIDIA GPUs.

The technology website Phoronix told readers that Google recently updated their public kernel library for Stadia’s Linux kernel builds .

In the latest update last month, support for building/installing NVIDIA’s proprietary driver stack was added. However, there is no official announcement about it yet.

Google’s side doesn’t clarify their motivation for supporting NVIDIA drivers in Stadia Linux kernel builds, but the code commit does mention ” adding support for kokoro job scripts to generate all that is needed for instances that include UMD/KMD NVIDIA modules and use NVIDIA GPUs. required corresponding support files “.

It is worth mentioning that the submission date of this commit is May 17th.

And just a week ago, NVIDIA just announced that it is developing an open source GPU kernel driver; so it can not help but wonder if Google has contributed to it.

For all the information at hand, Phoronix believes that there are at least some instances of Google Stadia now powered by NVIDIA graphics;

but whether this is for limited experimentation/testing purposes, or as part of a second-generation hardware design remains to be seen. To be confirmed.

“Considering that both Google and AMD have talked about Radeon graphics , which originally powered Stadia, and the acclaimed fully open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack, it’s a bit surprising to see Google possibly moving to Stadia powered by NVIDIA.”

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