Red Hat Experimenting With "NVK" Nouveau Open-Source Vulkan Driver

[binarybanana]

What about laptops which store the GPU firmware in the system firmware (/BIOS). On these the GPU firmware is pulled out via an ACPI call (IIRC "_ROM"). It seems like nouveau has no problem getting it and uploading it to the GPU. I haven't checked, but does that mean reclocking works on such systems? Or would at least be possible in theory without Nvidia releasing anything else?

[karolherbst]

You forget one very important piece - what Switch community did is likely not working in nouveau case.

1st Tons of Tegra (unlike geforce) is already open source with all the bits.

doesn't really matter. We do support the Tegra devices just fine.

2nd. There is Tegra development board extremly similar to switch in architecture (Jetson TX1). From perspective of Nouveau, if any work homebrew community did there, it is similar to what Nouveau does in relation to recent open source Nvidia Turing/Ampere driver - you have already stuff you need in open source way).

except userspace. Anyway, the homebrew community uses mesa/nouveau for OpenGL, and just never seriously contributed any patches back or just refused with bogus arguments like "you wouldn't accept those patches anyway". Or well.. never helped with fixing bugs So to twist it like the original comment did is kind of "hilarious".

3rd. I seriously doubt there is bypass to load unsigned firmware. Because there is tons of scams around that were modifing firmware loading it and selling (on wish for example) GTX 650 as 1050 by modyfing bits in it. Since nvidia introduced that system there is not a single firmware modding tool or ways to make your let's say gtx1060 pretend to be gtx1080ti.

There was actually a hw vulnerability which would allow to read out the signing key, because it's all symmetric crypto. But.. you can't publish those keys, so 1. every developer wanting to hack on the firmware would have to extract those keys and 2. Nvidia doesn't need to be pissed of by the nouveau community providing distributable signed firmware, which might or might not have prevented Nvidia even opening up and 3. would put Red Hat in this akward position where it pays money to Nouveau devs but also having a strong partnership with Nvidia.

All in all it's a very very messy situation and one might see why we didn't really want to go into this mess yet. At least from my perspective I wouldn't want to except I get a written ack from Nvidia that I am allowed to do this.

[piotrj3]

Probably in order for something for occur for older Nvidia card generations, you would need either Nvidia to release distributable firmware (unlikely), or someone to use the signing exploit on the Falcon processor to make custom reclocking firmware for it (possible).

But Nouveau maintainers refuse to accept contributions from the Switch homebrew community, who have done a lot of work on bypassing the Nvidia signing mechanisms, so take that as you will.

You forget one very important piece - what Switch community did is likely not working in nouveau case.

1st Tons of Tegra (unlike geforce) is already open source with all the bits.

2nd. There is Tegra development board extremly similar to switch in architecture (Jetson TX1). From perspective of Nouveau, if any work homebrew community did there, it is similar to what Nouveau does in relation to recent open source Nvidia Turing/Ampere driver - you have already stuff you need in open source way).

3rd. I seriously doubt there is bypass to load unsigned firmware. Because there is tons of scams around that were modifing firmware loading it and selling (on wish for example) GTX 650 as 1050 by modyfing bits in it. Since nvidia introduced that system there is not a single firmware modding tool or ways to make your let's say gtx1060 pretend to be gtx1080ti.

[karolherbst]

Why did they start only now to develop vulkan driver? 600 series has been for years with us.

with the current kernel interfaces vulkan isn't really possible. And even Vulkan on 600 series GPUs is a bit of a pain. Sure there could have been some work, but it wouldn't been very useful overall.

[RejectModernity]

Why did they start only now to develop vulkan driver? 600 series has been for years with us.

[karolherbst]

Nouveau developers want to stay legal for good reasons. Yeah, it sucks to leave perfectly usable cards in unusable state but I guess there is no other possibility.

Nouveau is used in commercial products even. And just sharing signing keys or whatever is available is a legal risk especially companies are not willing to get involved in, so worst case Nouveau gets disabled everywhere by default, because of such legal risks.

[karolherbst]

Probably in order for something for occur for older Nvidia card generations, you would need either Nvidia to release distributable firmware (unlikely), or someone to use the signing exploit on the Falcon processor to make custom reclocking firmware for it (possible).

But Nouveau maintainers refuse to accept contributions from the Switch homebrew community, who have done a lot of work on bypassing the Nvidia signing mechanisms, so take that as you will.

LOL not having a clue about anything but saying nonsense like this

[dragon321]

that's sadly correct.

I though so. Anyway it's a good thing that at least recent and future Nvidia cards will be able to have usable open source driver. Thank you for answer and for your and rest of developers work.

Probably in order for something for occur for older Nvidia card generations, you would need either Nvidia to release distributable firmware (unlikely), or someone to use the signing exploit on the Falcon processor to make custom reclocking firmware for it (possible).

But Nouveau maintainers refuse to accept contributions from the Switch homebrew community, who have done a lot of work on bypassing the Nvidia signing mechanisms, so take that as you will.

Nouveau developers want to stay legal for good reasons. Yeah, it sucks to leave perfectly usable cards in unusable state but I guess there is no other possibility.

[oleid]

It's a shame it's not supported. As it ages, Nvidia is surely abandoning it.

Well, wasn't that to be expected? That's the way of hardware with no oss support. And that's why I prefer the other teams.

[uyjulian]

I'm guessing that GSP firmware will enable Nouveau to do proper clock and power management only for Turing and newer and situation won't change for Maxwell, Pascal and Volta?

Probably in order for something for occur for older Nvidia card generations, you would need either Nvidia to release distributable firmware (unlikely), or someone to use the signing exploit on the Falcon processor to make custom reclocking firmware for it (possible).

But Nouveau maintainers refuse to accept contributions from the Switch homebrew community, who have done a lot of work on bypassing the Nvidia signing mechanisms, so take that as you will.