Nvidia Releases 12,000 Lines of 3D Class Header Files for Blackwell A and B GPUs

The American company Nvidia has made 12,000 lines of header files related to the 3D classes of its latest Blackwell A and Blackwell B graphics processors publicly accessible.

These header files are associated with the programming of the 3D engine for Blackwell GPUs and serve as valuable official resources for developing open-source Linux drivers, including the NVK Mesa Vulkan driver.

Previously, Nvidia released the source code for 73,000 header files pertaining to older generation GPUs (Fermi and Ampere).

A developer from the Mesa team has already imported all these new Nvidia header files into the Mesa source repository for use by the Nouveau/NVK driver code.

The Linux 6.16 kernel also introduced initial support for Blackwell in the Nouveau graphics driver, while Mesa 25.2 implemented early support for the NVK Vulkan driver for Blackwell.

Notably, original patches for the Nouveau kernel driver were published by Nvidia concurrently with support for Hopper. It is also worth mentioning that developers from Nouveau/NVK, such as those at Red Hat, seem to have recently gained access to Nvidia’s NDA documentation, aiding them in their efforts to develop open-source drivers.

For instance, a patch for Mesa Git, released by David Airlie of Red Hat, references certain values taken «from Nvidia NDA documentation.»

In recent years, Nvidia has significantly increased its contributions to open-source software development and is putting more effort into supporting projects, ranging from the development of its own open-source driver to initiatives focused on software development like Nouveau/NOVA. However, developers on both sides still rely on non-disclosure documentation for hardware support.