Do not use open source NVIDIA drivers on Linux 6.3

Do not use open source NVIDIA drivers on Linux 6.3

Users should avoid using the open source NVIDIA “Nouveau” Linux graphics driver on the stable Linux 6.3 series, which has a serious bug that can cause various problems on the system.

A public Nouveau bug report is tracking this unresolved issue: There is a use-after -free issue in the Nouveau DRM kernel driver that can lead to kernel memory corruption.

The use-after-free issue is also a potential security hole where corrupted kernel memory can lead to filesystem corruption or other system issues.

Nouveau is an open source driver project written for Nvidia graphics cards, built by a group of developers who reverse engineered Nvidia’s proprietary Linux drivers.

The current open source NVIDIA Nouveau driver stack provides good open source support for GeForce GTX 600/700 series graphics cards on Linux, but for GeForce GTX 900 series and newer graphics cards, frequency issues due to signature firmware/PMU issues, This family of drivers is limited to running with a low startup clock.

Additionally, the Nouveau Vulkan driver is still in the early stages of development, and the transition to using NVIDIA GSP firmware with RTX 20-series and newer is still in progress.

To sum up, there are not many active users who actually use the Nouveau series drivers. In fact, most Nouveau users will only use the Nouveau series drivers as a transition when they first install the Linux system, and finally install NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers.

Red Hat’s Nouveau developer Karol Herbst recommends that users running Nouveau on Linux 6.3 downgrade to the Linux 6.2 kernel series until this issue is resolved in a future Linux 6.3 release.