NVIDIA To Begin Publishing Open GPU Documentation

[johnc]

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...er/014495.html

IMHO that's a rather honest post concerning the motivation behind
the plans to release some functionality in a binary-only firmware.

Promising (the honesty), I like that.

Yeah I was just reading that. That bodes well if they push stuff like p-state switching into the firmware.

[Sonadow]

For microcode: from NVIDIA's perspective, I think we'd like to move to a model where NVIDIA releases microcode firmware (as binary-only) with a defined ABI, versioning, and reasonable licensing to allow redistribution.
We have some release engineering process improvements to make there, since today the firmware is allowed to evolve along side the NVIDIA proprietary driver code, and the two are released in lock-step. But longer-term, I think we'd like to move things to the firmware that either we're not comfortable documenting, or things that are Real Hard to get right, like P-state switching.

Sounds like a reasonable tradeoff. Open drivers with binary firmware is the model which most companies are adopting right now. Off the top of my head, Qualcomm Atheros, Ralink (Mediatek), Intel and AMD are all adopting this model for their respective hardware offerings.

[smorovic]

Sounds like a reasonable tradeoff. Open drivers with binary firmware is the model which most companies are adopting right now. Off the top of my head, Qualcomm Atheros, Ralink (Mediatek), Intel and AMD are all adopting this model for their respective hardware offerings.

In one of the replies, the guy asks why does the firmware allow a bare user to access anything on the hardware, including the physical memory of the system I hope it isn't that bad.

Otherwise, a smart move by Nvidia. I hope they open whatever they can, and the rest after they audit whatever they have to. Wouldn't be bad to hire a few devs either.

[curaga]

And here I was wondering why it suddenly got chilly in here.

[libv]

Sounds like a reasonable tradeoff. Open drivers with binary firmware is the model which most companies are adopting right now. Off the top of my head, Qualcomm Atheros, Ralink (Mediatek), Intel and AMD are all adopting this model for their respective hardware offerings.

Things could have been much much better for the AMD GPU situation. Looking back, the only way i could have changed that is by claiming to love ATOMBIOS and using it as the one and only solution for the graphics driver that redhat did not want. Then Avivo would've been the standard driver today, and we would have control over display details, and would have per-card initialization done in C regularly.

Hindsight is 20-20.

[pingufunkybeat]

Well, that's quite an unexpected turn.

This is what I've been expecting from them all along. Now let's see if (how) they walk the walk.

Great news for NVidia owners and nouveau users, though.

[89c51]

Cool and all but i ll still support AMD. They hire people and have delivered.

[dee.]

Sounds like a reasonable tradeoff. Open drivers with binary firmware is the model which most companies are adopting right now. Off the top of my head, Qualcomm Atheros, Ralink (Mediatek), Intel and AMD are all adopting this model for their respective hardware offerings.

Yes, that sounds entirely reasonable. I'm sure we'll all be happy with NSA-approved firmware blobs in our open drivers...

[pingufunkybeat]

Yes, that sounds entirely reasonable. I'm sure we'll all be happy with NSA-approved firmware blobs in our open drivers...

The blobs run exclusively on the graphics card.

What harm can they do there?

[entropy]

The blobs run exclusively on the graphics card.

What harm can they do there?

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/nouveau/2013-September/014497.html