NVIDIA Provides Open-Source Tegra K1 Support In Nouveau

[benmoran]

Part of me hopes Nvidia is starting to see the light, but it honestly looks like this is just beneficial to Nvidia, not the users.

[blackout23]

What do you guys want? Should NVIDIA drop support for their blob and only focus on the open source stack with Mesa which would send the driver quality back into the dark ages?

[Szzz]

What do you guys want? Should NVIDIA drop support for their blob and only focus on the open source stack with Mesa which would send the driver quality back into the dark ages?

Or they can open-source their driver.

[CrvenaZvezda]

What do you guys want? Should NVIDIA drop support for their blob and only focus on the open source stack with Mesa which would send the driver quality back into the dark ages?

NVIDIA should drop support for their blob and only focus on the open source stack with Mesa which would send the driver quality through the roof and make development for NVIDA gpu's really attractive for large corporations and small indi-houses.

[mrugiero]

Or they can open-source their driver.

Maybe they don't own all of the copyright, or use someone else's patents. In the first case, they would need to negotiate with the other holders for a free release, and in the second I have no idea how it could be handled, but in both cases success is unlikely, even IF NVIDIA was willing to do it, which I think they aren't.

[blackout23]

Or they can open-source their driver.

Highly doubt that you could just open source it and merge it into mesa, they most likely use totally different interfaces and everything would have to be rewritten. Also the blobs are probably patent minefields.

[benmoran]

Of course they can't open source their binary blob, but they could probably catch up with AMD in a few years if they started taking the OSS drivers seriously. Nouveau team already did most of the legwork.

[smitty3268]

What do you guys want? Should NVIDIA drop support for their blob and only focus on the open source stack with Mesa which would send the driver quality back into the dark ages?

There's no reason to think they couldn't help out both. Their blob driver is already in great shape, it can basically just coast for a while at this point and stay that way, and it would only take a couple people with documentation to really make a difference on the OSS side.

Anyway, i don't expect Nvidia to do anything of the sort. They've made their position crystal clear, and anyone who has bought their hardware should have known that from the start.

I just think it should be made clear that this contribution is practically useless in it's current form, rather than some great new thing to be praised. Perhaps someday, they'll release something big - but this isn't it.

As for what i'd want them to focus on first, if it was my say? The power-management code. If the existing nouveau driver could just reclock the hardware properly it would be in a lot better position. That's what i'd want from them most.

[MWisBest]

I wonder why Michael left this part of the mail out:

Why am I not surprised...

I don't think so, as those manufacturers never cared. Otherwise, PowerVR would have never had success, as most of ARM SoC oriented GPUs which are mostly proprietary.

As to the article in general, any cooperation is something. Far from ideal and far from what AMD and Intel do to support open source, but better than nothing.

PVR isn't closed.

[GreatEmerald]

As for what i'd want them to focus on first, if it was my say? The power-management code. If the existing nouveau driver could just reclock the hardware properly it would be in a lot better position. That's what i'd want from them most.

They already said they were looking at it, but just like with AMD's DPM, there are a lot of things to do legal and technical review for.