Reverse-Engineering Could Yield A Linux NV "PerfKit"

[darkbasic]

And yet I still giggle every time I see it.

+1 it's always funny

[beaverusiv]

When you write "free from theft", do you mean copying the software tool in question or copying the hardware design? If it's the former, then this hypothetical open sourcing of the tool in question would let anyone copy it freely, so the question answers itself. If it's the later, then the answer to that is, "only if those doing the copying get caught." If they keep their designs secret, and do not open source their equivalents of tools like the one in question, then they won't get caught, right?

I was thinking of a situation where they all went open source, but yeah very valid, and even if they all have mutual agreements to open up it doesn't stop an outside party abusing that agreement.

[entropy]

After some week of hard work, I have succeeded in documenting most of these signals.
However, some of them (like vertex_shader_busy for example) are still currently not understandable
for me but I?ll try to do this task as soon as possible.

Well, he should challenge NVIDIA by their words and ask on the Nouveau mailing list.
Nice work, BTW.

[toni]

This is great!

Graphics development in linux is becoming increasingly interesting

[Serge]

It makes me wonder a few things;
1) Shouldn't patent/copyright/whateverthefark law protect them enough that open sourcing tools like this would be free from theft?
2) I'd be incredibly interested to know what kind of patents/secrets they have and how similar each companies take on it is. I would pmsl if they were all doing pretty much the same thing and trying so hard to hide it from each other.

When you write "free from theft", do you mean copying the software tool in question or copying the hardware design? If it's the former, then this hypothetical open sourcing of the tool in question would let anyone copy it freely, so the question answers itself. If it's the later, then the answer to that is, "only if those doing the copying get caught." If they keep their designs secret, and do not open source their equivalents of tools like the one in question, then they won't get caught, right?

[Dukenukemx]

It was funnier the first 50,000 times I saw it. Give it a rest...

And yet I still giggle every time I see it.

[beaverusiv]

It makes me wonder a few things;
1) Shouldn't patent/copyright/whateverthefark law protect them enough that open sourcing tools like this would be free from theft?
2) I'd be incredibly interested to know what kind of patents/secrets they have and how similar each companies take on it is. I would pmsl if they were all doing pretty much the same thing and trying so hard to hide it from each other.

[smitty3268]

If I'm reading this right, this is a tool separate from drivers, right? What is stopping NVIDIA releasing something like this themselves? Would it give away too much of the architecture?

This kind of tool tends to be highly hardware specific, and can tell someone a lot about the underlying architecture. Just knowing what some of these registers are measuring is considered top secret, not only by NVidia but also AMD and even Intel.

[DanL]

NV50 = GeForce 8000-series through GT300 series for those who can't keep track

tired image

It was funnier the first 50,000 times I saw it. Give it a rest...

[beaverusiv]

If I'm reading this right, this is a tool separate from drivers, right? What is stopping NVIDIA releasing something like this themselves? Would it give away too much of the architecture?

Either way, I'm glad there is progress. Well done to everyone who put in the hard yards. I want to believe that NVIDIA want to make progress.