NVIDIA GA103 Support Posted For Open-Source Nouveau Linux Driver

[You-]

In the context of the original comment(question) about reclocking firmware, this link is a little cryptic. It only mentions re-clocking in one section of the article.

This is the full firmware as used by the proprietary driver so has full support. There is a blog post by Christian Schaller of RedHat/Fedora which goes into more details including why older firmware releases to not allow reclocking. In short, Nouveau did not use the same firmware as the full fat proprietary driver. It had limited features and was awkward to get updates because it wasnt the standard firmware.

The previous firmwares that are redistributeable are cut down specifically for Nouveau and limited in featureset, but the ones in this repository are full fat. However at the time of release the licence was a little unclear - it was stated the intent was to be redistributeable but one of the files in the repo had a limitation of "with this driver only". It was unclear if it was an oversight, but the assumption was that was a mistake and would be corrected.

Things are not perfect yet and nvidia can still play games (or refuse to redistribute firmware for later graphics drivers etc), but there is a chance that for newer graphics cards things will work well.

People with 7xxx, 9xxx, 10xx and 16xx cards are out of luck though.

[luno]

People with 7xxx, 9xxx, 10xx and 16xx cards are out of luck though.

some 16xx cards are turing

[bemerk]

There efforts are only valid once the complete firmware for all generations of cards is released to the public. I also hope to see more work on the user space side too

[ezst036]

but there is a chance that for newer graphics cards things will work well.

People with 7xxx, 9xxx, 10xx and 16xx cards are out of luck though.

Cards from 7xxx, 9xxx, 10xx and 16xx are the question.
(excluding the handful of cards that are Turing.)

[bemerk]

If they release the reclock firmware, i am sure developers can take it from there for older cards. It would be rather simple once the legal stuff is cleared.

[jonwil]

If they release the reclock firmware, i am sure developers can take it from there for older cards. It would be rather simple once the legal stuff is cleared.

Its not that simple. On these cards the hardware registers needed for reclocking (along with many other features of the cards) are only accessible to firmware downloaded to the card and running on the card. The firmware that is downloaded to the cards has a digital signature that is verified by the card so unless you are loading firmware that has been signed by NVIDIA, the card will not work.

In the past there were 2 ways you could get firmware that would work on these cards. One was to somehow extract the firmware from the NVIDIA binary driver (VERY difficult to do and in doing so you would be violating copyright law most likely, especially if you distributed it) and the other was to use the firmware NVIDIA released and allowed Noveau to use. This firmware was cut down and didn't include what was necessary for reclocking.

Whilst the firmware in the new "open source" kernel driver (the one that had its guts ripped out and put into the firmware instead) does have reclocking support and could (assuming NVIDIA allows redistribution and use of the firmware by Noveau) be used to allow reclocking support on the 20xx and 30xx cards, it does absolutely nothing for the ability to reclock older cards since the signed reclocking firmware for those is unavailable (its only in the binary blob driver and can't be used by Noveau) and its not possible for Noveau to produce their own firmware (because of the signature requirement)

[bemerk]

I of course want a 900 series binary reclocking capable firmware, signed by the proper nvidia keys so it can be loaded and used or their private signing key instead.
I know that this is taking forever and highly unlikely but i don't think it would hurt the sales department for current revisions like the 3000 or 4000 series.