NVIDIA Alerts Nouveau: They're Starting To Sign/Validate GPU Firmware Images

[nanonyme]

This is about HUMANS. It is not important if it is politics, commerce or whatever else. This works universally and there is no excuse for being tyrant. Tivoization has became a rather negative term because people hardly like tyrants who are "protecting" you from your own freedom. So I wish Nvidia a slow, painful death. What a bastardized company! I would be really happy if they happen to be bankrupts so we no longer have to encounter that wretched hardware at all.

You know what you can do if you want freedom in commerce? Vote with your wallet. You might end up having very little but at least what you have is free. Then again, if everyone votes with their wallets, markets change. By buying hardware you accept everything the vendor is doing

[gradinaruvasile]

From the article:

This is why the open-source Radeon graphics don't work in Debian and other distributions that refrain from shipping binary-only firmware blobs.

Say what???
The OSS radeon driver (i have an r600g) works just fine (UVD/vdpau, opengl) on Debian Testing with the repo firmware images (firmware-linux-nonfree package, right there in the official Debian repos).

Please dont give false informations.

[nanonyme]

Okay, so ucode is an anglistic way to miswrite Greek symbol for micro as in microcode. Good to know for future reference

[nanonyme]

From the article:


Say what???
The OSS radeon driver (i have an r600g) works just fine (UVD/vdpau, opengl) on Debian Testing with the repo firmware images (firmware-linux-nonfree package, right there in the official Debian repos).

Please dont give false informations.

He's probably just confusing "not distributing" with "not having installed by default". The latter has been a real problem with live cd's

[Sonadow]

He's probably just confusing "not distributing" with "not having installed by default". The latter has been a real problem with live cd's

Except that firmware cannot be, and is never installed. It's copypasta-ed wholesale, blob and all from the distribution's repository / vendor's website directly into /lib/firmware.

[System25]

You know what you can do if you want freedom in commerce? Vote with your wallet. You might end up having very little but at least what you have is free. Then again, if everyone votes with their wallets, markets change. By buying hardware you accept everything the vendor is doing

Yes, and I already did that - I only have Intel and AMD GPUs since Nvidia is the most sucking company I ever seen. I really wonder if they is also going to supply free Terminator instance to make sure I would not apply high-voltage discharge to their crap. Or else it would not leave visible traces if done correctly, but hardware will be pretty dead, without obvious evidence. So they can be sued, blah-blah-blah.

[carewolf]

Historically it has been that broken (during manufacturing) chips get "crippled" by firmware and sold such that the remaining functionally constitutes a different functional selling than the non-broken one would have. If you remove the "crippling", the chip will still remain partially broken and most likely crash as it then randomly tries to use hardware that doesn't work

Yes, and no. The problem is that natural distribution of quality makes the high-end the most common, while on the market most sold are low end. This means they need to criple a lot of high-end chips to serve the low-end market. This is the same with Intel and clock frequencies.

[System25]

Except that firmware cannot be, and is never installed.

Depends on hardware. If you do not supply your external firmware, hardware can default to internal one. You see, say, CISC CPU can't operate without uCode ROM. It would just use older (factory) version instead. Yet, using newer version can allow to fix some "hardware" bugs - that's the whole point why uCode ROM has been made updateable. Intel had some nasty bugs some Pentium commands and they faced numerous returns/replacements. Now it is possible partially fix CPUs in place if your system can boot far enough to apply newer microcode. Though mentioned ucode is different thing. CPU's uCode is something like lookup table to translate CISC commands to micro-ops. Mentioned firmware seems to be usual microcontroller firmware for some small processor which handles some service tasks.

[birdie]

Open-Source developers won't do mistake if all was clearly documented...

ORLY?

What about hundreds of poorly supported devices in Linux? What about buggy as hell Wi-Fi USB drivers? What about buggy as hell GBit NIC drivers (aside from Intel's)? Do me a favour and run the "regression site:lkml.org" query on google.com. Be astonished.

Do you really think nouveau developers give a flying f*ck if your GPU burns in flames if they make a mistake? Have you actually read nouveau's mailing list where egregious regressions come up in dozens every month? God, open source fanatics seem to believe that open source developers somehow have better brains which allow them to write flawless code right from the start and never make mistakes.

You seriously need to take off your rose glasses.

[birdie]

This is about HUMANS. It is not important if it is politics, commerce or whatever else. This works universally and there is no excuse for being tyrant. Tivoization has became a rather negative term because people hardly like tyrants who are "protecting" you from your own freedom. So I wish Nvidia a slow, painful death. What a bastardized company! I would be really happy if they happen to be bankrupts so we no longer have to encounter that wretched hardware at all.

You really need to go see a shrink. NVIDIA doesn't owe you anything. You don't like their GPUs? Don't use them.

NVIDIA has thousands of mouths to feed. You are only concerned about "freedom". Freedom from what? From rational thinking? Again, NVIDIA is not a charity - it's a company whose sole goal is to make money and survive.

If you can create an open source GPU which can successfully compete with NVIDIA solutions - go do that. Alas, GPUs are the most complex computational devices nowadays - according to NVIDIA's own estimates over three thousand talented engineers and scientists worked for three years to create Maxwell.

Three thousand people where each one of them is ten times smarter than you.