NVIDIA Posts Firmware Needed For Open-Source GeForce 16 Series Acceleration

[yoshi314]

Is there no way around the PMU firmware?
E.g. it cannot be extracted from the binary blob or something?

afaik it's a very tedious process for nouveau devs due to the way driver uploads the firmware now. i think they explained it once somewhere on the forums. redoing it every time nvidia pushes out a driver would be very time consuming.

[CommunityMember]

Is there no way around the PMU firmware?

Even with the PMU firmware, there have always been a very limited number of devs that are able, and chosen to work on, the reclocking code (and controlling the clocks is still manual even on nvidia cards that they already have the needed information about, which is not exactly a good solution), and as recently mentioned in another article here on phoronix, the nouveau developer community has mostly gotten smaller rather than larger as those people moved on to other interests. If you want it to get better, you need to join and contribute your talents to make it happen. If open source drivers are something important for you have the strength of your beliefs and do what others do and vote with your wallet and select a different GPU.

[kpedersen]

I wonder if NVIDIA expects us to be grateful for little handouts like this?

No NVIDIA, binary blobs are a legacy idea and broken by design; grow the hell up and give us access to our hardware which we paid for.

[starshipeleven]

I really don't understand why they'd release firmware for hardware acceleration but without the bits required to get the card in a higher performance state?

This way the card will work well enough to show a GUI (GNOME and KDE need OpenGL to run at all) and this is enough to be able to use the PC at all and install the blob driver.

It's like Nvidia is afraid the mesa drivers will get to a point where it's good enough so people won't be bothered to install their blob?

Probably because they enable or disable stuff in the driver to segment the market (people have been known to hack around GPU BIOS to have normal GPUs reported as Quadro and run with professional features for example), and in general want to have full control over what their cards can do. Letting third party develop the driver would mean losing control and they are control freaks.

[starshipeleven]

afaik it's a very tedious process for nouveau devs due to the way driver uploads the firmware now. i think they explained it once somewhere on the forums. redoing it every time nvidia pushes out a driver would be very time consuming.

It's worse than that, you can't redistribute the firmware blob, and extracting from the driver is hard and requires having a hacked kernel that disables some protections so you can't just have the users do that like it was back then when they just provided a script the users could run.

[CochainComplex]

It seems to be a step forward...
But if I reconsider the issues I have had with official Nvidia drivers ...days of wasted times making it runable and then it breaks over and over again once the rolling distro changes something which the out of tree driver doesn't like. So any progress on the nouveau driver is highly appreciated.
And no I don't want to use another distro just because Nvida is making the driver better for them. A good driver should be Distribution independent and only rely on Kernel and display server protocol.

[starshipeleven]

It seems to be a step forward...

Its' not. NVIDIA always releases these kind of "just show a display" firmware a year after the card is out.

[Guest]

It's worse than that, you can't redistribute the firmware blob, and extracting from the driver is hard and requires having a hacked kernel that disables some protections so you can't just have the users do that like it was back then when they just provided a script the users could run.

That sounds better than nothing; are there steps that actually detail the entire process? And is this something you can do basically once to get the firmware, and be good to go? I can't imagine NVIDIA changes their firmware code for certain GPUs too often.

[starshipeleven]

That sounds better than nothing; are there steps that actually detail the entire process?

You would need to ask Noveau developers. Afaik this is what they said to answer the "why can't we extract the firmware" question years ago, and it was more like they didn't want to waste time reversing stuff they could not really use on a decent scale, so I don't know if anyone actually did try and how well it went.

And is this something you can do basically once to get the firmware, and be good to go? I can't imagine NVIDIA changes their firmware code for certain GPUs too often.

Yes and no. Yes the firmware will probably not change in a long while if ever so you don't need to extract this stuff often, no it's useless if Noveau does not actually do anything with it. You can't just load it and then boom it magically works.

[ix900]

All the cry babies that don't use Nvidia jump on this and post lol. If AMD is that great then why do you care what Nvidia does? Go back to AMD. There. Here's a reply that's equally as crappy.

That's what you want, that's what you got. Complaining about Nvidia continuously like you're stuck in a time loop hasn't done anything. It just makes people sick of you.

Nouveau, Mesa, etc. all suck anyway. If you want it you got it. You're just going to have other problems. 2k problems on Mesa alone https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/issues That's 2,000 possible problems you might run into. Have fun