The Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Will End Out 2019 In Poor Shape Still For Newer GPUs

[vitalif]

Extracting the firmware from the driver blob is still hard to do (you cannot just use a script that cuts and pastes like it was done in the past), you cannot redistribute the firmware because of legal permissions, and you cannot automate a firmware extraction process in the user system as it requires a custom hacked kernel to bypass the secure firmware load.

This was never an obstacle with drivers like broadcom etc... In fact there were scripts that successfully extracted the firmware from broadcom windows driver. The driver is able to decrypt and extract firmware itself, so an external script should also be able to. I mean it's there somewhere, someone just needs to find it

[starshipeleven]

This was never an obstacle with drivers like broadcom etc... In fact there were scripts that successfully extracted the firmware from broadcom windows driver. The driver is able to decrypt and extract firmware itself, so an external script should also be able to. I mean it's there somewhere, someone just needs to find it

This was done also with some older NVIDIA drivers/cards, but it is not possible to do anymore, the easiest method is to intercept the firmware load when it is done by the kernel, but it is not really easy. This is what noveau developers said some time ago.

In other words, NVIDIA has complicated the process on purpose, pretty much none else gives 2 shits about protecting the firmware like that, they just bundle it with the driver and that's it. Easy to extract.

[starshipeleven]

Nvidia could just build a big-firmware

No they can't, stop this bs.

Firmware runs on the device, the driver on the CPU. You can't move the driver in the device as it is doing jobs that are far more efficiently done by the CPU.

[starshipeleven]

other drivers do this for years... like "wlan" device drivers or lan chip drivers.

GPU is not wlan or lan chip.

GPU hardware processor is not efficient for all tasks it has to do.

GPU drivers run a bunch of tasks on the host CPU.

If you want a self-sufficient GPU firmware you must integrate x86 CPU in GPU.

Does not matter how many times you repeat stupid ideas. It remains stupid for GPU to move all code to a firmware. You just show everyone you don't know what you are talking about.