NVIDIA Publishes 73k Lines Worth Of 3D Header Files For Fermi Through Ampere GPUs

[schmidtbag]

I am sorry but you are projecting here because this completely wrong on both counts. With 1 NVidia (or any company like them) would not cave into "open source hacktivists" because it would create a bad precedent and for 2, NVidia didn't really open source anything of value. The only thing they have open sourced is the in kernel wrapper and the only way they made this possible is by putting their proprietary logic into an onboard chip that exists on NVidia GPU's (thats why NVidia's new open source wrapper only works with newer GPU's, older GPU's physically don't have this GSP chip).

In fact the main reason that NVidia open sourced this kernel wrapper was basically to play better with GBM and also Wayland.

Well, (1) is obviously ridiculous, so we can just ignore that outright. (2) doesn't fit with nvidia's corporate culture, or the internal and external messaging of the last 20-ish years, and is mostly untrue anyway, so that's absurdly unlikely too.

Projecting what? There's no "projection" that Nvidia was recently hacked, and open-sourcing their code was in fact one of the demands. Despite the years of pleas, it's a little odd that only now they're considering it. So, not as ridiculous as either of you think. If the hackers already had Nvidia's code (not sure if they really did), what difference does it make? Their source code was going to be released no matter what. It's better for Nvidia to release it and act like it was intentional than it is to let the hackers do it for them and tarnish their reputation. It's the same idea as doing crappy work at your job, so you quit before they fire you.
Open-sourcing the kernel wrapper is a big step in the right direction. Despite what a lot of people here think, Nouveau is in pretty good shape, but things like reclocking are a major setback. Anything to make that easier is a big deal.

I mean, it's possible that it's "3: give a dog a bone", since this does nothing of any meaningful benefit *unless* it's just the first step in a more complete and complex process - but since nvidia DGAF about the feewings of a handful of entitled asshats, and doing even this much would be a waste of time and energy unless they planned to follow up on it, nobody sane would buy that idea either. Unless they're just trolling, of course - but again, Occam's Razor.

Riiiight.... giving a dog a bone to a handful of entitled asshats totally fit's Nvidia's culture, but discovering that open-sourcing code can yield long-term profits doesn't? Seems to me you don't know Nvidia all that well.

[karolherbst]

It's perfectly possible but it's illegal, so nouveau developers cannot follow this path.

well technically it's fine as long as each user is doing it on their own system. Some might say that providing scripts through packaging and extracting automatically _might_ be legal. Some distributions are doing it for the video acceleration firmware, we can use in Nouveau to provide vdpau/vaapi support. But it's still an annoying path. And some legal teams won't green light it.

[mdedetrich]

Projecting what?

Your ideals on how open source "works" and how you think NVidia is effected by it.

There's no "projection" that Nvidia was recently hacked, and open-sourcing their code was in fact one of the demands. Despite the years of pleas, it's a little odd that only now they're considering it. So, not as ridiculous as either of you think. If the hackers already had Nvidia's code, what difference does it make? Their source code was going to be released no matter what. It's better for Nvidia to release it and act like it was intentional than it is to let the hackers do it for them and tarnish their reputation. It's the same idea as doing crappy work at your job, so you quit before they fire you.
Open-sourcing the kernel wrapper is a big step in the right direction. Despite what a lot of people here think, Nouveau is in pretty good shape, but things like reclocking are a major setback. Anything to make that easier is a big deal.

It made zero difference because what NVidia open sourced had zero in common to what was leaked. NVidia basically implemented their own in kernel wrapper and moved code from the proprietary driver into their GSP chip. This was already in motion for at least 1.5 years well before the leak happened (and even Phoronix reported on this ages ago). That leak had zero relevance to what NVidia did and if you had any idea how companies work you wouldn't claim such stupidity. In order for NVidia to open source or release anything, it takes them years to prepare and to preplan that both for technical and for legal reasons.

Ontop of that, what NVidia is releasing isn't of any real use to anyone about from Linux kernel dev's. All they open sourced is the interface for GBM for their GPU's, the actual drivers are all still proprietary blobs that sit in userland.

[karolherbst]

Your ideals on how open source "works" and how you think NVidia is effected by it.



It made zero difference because what NVidia open sourced had zero in common to what was leaked. NVidia basically implemented their own in kernel wrapper and moved code from the proprietary driver into their GSP chip. This was already in motion for at least 1.5 years well before the leak happened (and even Phoronix reported on this ages ago). That leak had zero relevance to what NVidia did and if you had any idea how companies work you wouldn't claim such stupidity. In order for NVidia to open source or release anything, it takes them years to prepare and to preplan that both for technical and for legal reasons.

the leak had zero impact on any of the open sourcing or releasing docs. period. We can simply end this discussion here :P

[schmidtbag]

Your ideals on how open source "works" and how you think NVidia is effected by it.

How are they ideals when I already gave an example on how it is proven to be profitable? Unless AMD is paying Red Hat, Valve, and others to improve their drivers, they are effectively profiting via open-source. Because of AMD's openness, they became the only viable choice for some applications, which gave them sales. So, not sure what you're trying to argue here, but Nvidia isn't stupid - they must be noticing such things. They didn't keep things closed for so long for no reason. There are several risks to open-sourcing something proprietary, and as a company, they can't just release everything overnight (as you pointed out yourself) or for free. So, there is a financial incentive to do this. Don't let your ideals get in the way of this reality.

It made zero difference because what NVidia open sourced had zero in common to what was leaked. NVidia basically implemented their own in kernel wrapper and moved code from the proprietary driver into their GSP chip. This was already in motion for at least 1.5 years well before the leak happened (and even Phoronix reported on this ages ago). That leak had zero relevance to what NVidia did and if you had any idea how companies work you wouldn't claim such stupidity. In order for NVidia to open source or release anything, it takes them years to prepare and to preplan that both for technical and for legal reasons.

Ontop of that, what NVidia is releasing isn't of any real use to anyone about from Linux kernel dev's. All they open sourced is the interface for GBM for their GPU's, the actual drivers are all still proprietary blobs that sit in userland.

None of what you said disputes anything I said, and I myself have pointed out the complications involved when I referenced how long it took for AMD to release their stuff. So, I know more about this than you're giving me credit for.
So yes, of course Nvidia has been working on this for years, but they were in no rush to release anything. It is reasonable to assume the hack may have prompted Nvidia to be a little bit more proactive. As you pointed out, what they released isn't much, because there isn't time for them to release anything else. It really oughtn't to take 1.5 years to release something like the GBM interface, so, if push came to shove, that was an easy first step for them to say "see? We're doing something" while it could take many more months for them to release anything else.
So, how about spending a little more time thinking about how the situation works rather than be a dickhead? While I'm not saying Nvidia has catered to the hackers, your arguments against it are falling flat, and your know-it-all attitude just shows arrogance rather than actually critically thinking about why it isn't possible. The funny thing is: the most obvious reason why Nvidia isn't catering to the hackers is one you didn't bring up: Nvidia clearly didn't release enough to satisfy the hackers, and I'm sure they're not going to just sit around for several years for them to meet the condition. However, we don't know what the full conditions are, which is why I brought it up as a possibility.

[_ReD_]

Good, Nvidia. Thanks!
Now, more!

[birdie]

Because they are not trying to cripple open source drivers.

Nvidia trying to cripple nouveau is a figment of your inflamed imagination. There's never been such an intention or action.

[carewolf]

Nvidia trying to cripple nouveau is a figment of your inflamed imagination. There's never been such an intention or action.

Every action they have ever taken supports that interpretation. What world have you been living on?

Plus the reasoning is quite logical. Many of the features they have made Quadro only are driver features, not hardware features. If open source drivers would become good enough the market segmentation that have been profitting from with Quadro hardware wouldn't work anymore.

They have hardware market segmentation implemented in software alone.

[smitty3268]

Why reclocking is possible on AMD and Intel GPus by open drivers?

My understanding (which could be wrong) is that the NVidia hardware requires the firmware uploaded to be signed with a key. A key which isn't known publicly. So that means the open source drivers can't create their own firmware which does what's necessary, and the only option is either cracking that key or using the firmware that nvidia provides in their proprietary drivers.

That would work, but NVidia doesn't allow redistribution of them, which means if the devs took that firmware and started passing it around in their driver they'd be guilty of copyright infringement and they aren't willing to do that since they are mostly Red Hat developers. It is possible to download the nvidia drivers and then extract the firmware yourself and use it personally... But I think the nouveau devs have stayed away from that on the grounds that they don't want to be seen as encouraging piracy, since you know any tool like that would quickly be used to post those firmware files everywhere. Again, because they work for Red Hat and want to have good relations with NVidia.

AMD and Intel just provide their firmware files and allow people to redistribute them freely.

[oiaohm]

Ontop of that, what NVidia is releasing isn't of any real use to anyone about from Linux kernel dev's. All they open sourced is the interface for GBM for their GPU's, the actual drivers are all still proprietary blobs that sit in userland.

No there is more too this. Not just for Linux kernel developers. You have to remember BSD and haiku-os and other open source kernel developers are interested in this information so Nvidia GPU do in fact fire up right. The Linux kernel graphics drivers are used as reference for many operating systems that are not Linux. Yes these are smaller operating systems.

NVidia basically implemented their own in kernel wrapper and moved code from the proprietary driver into their GSP chip.

This is not quite going to plan. Lot of high end GPU users to really upset by GSP being used to lock out cryptocoin mining that result in hitting there data processing by mistake and are now demanding the right to run their own code in the GSP chip or at least totally disable it. At least totally disabled GSP has predictable performance overhead vs doing something tripping crytocoin mining alarm so getting magical not explained slow down that stuff you over with allocated processing time. Think research super computers here where people only get so much allocated time to do their processing and if the party before you tripped the GPU into slow mode then it was still in slow mode when you attempted to do your processing are you not going to be pissed off baddy to find out what you expected to be processed by X time for Y presentation is not processed. (being faster is not the only fact here reliability is as well)

The result of the GSP chip now is a duplication between the proprietary driver and the GSP chip. Yes also you have high end wanting to be able to fire the GPU up with validated code now as well to make sure they are not going to have random performance events.