Nouveau Developers Remain Blocked By NVIDIA From Advancing Open-Source Driver

[karolherbst]

This thread makes funny reading.. All the indignant outcries, wide-eyed radicality.. like watching teenage kids bashing the 'hated authorities'..

Give it a decade or two and you might suddenly notice being the target yourself.. undeservedly in your own eyes.

I'd be curious to see how many of you would really care about open-source from the second it would threaten IP your economic well-being depends from. Then you would perhaps see the open-source die-hards as a pack of vultures trying to get for free what you worked your ass off to achieve.. All things are relative, like Einstein proved..

uhhh, well that might be true, but we simply ask to at least help us out with their signed firmware situation. It doesn't change a thing for the IP situation. Also they even published stuff with their NVGPU driver, which we asked for, but never got an answer. So "IP" doesn't really seems to be the problem here, does it?

The main problem is the attitude. We could have a nice project with their having the stuff their need and we do our stuff all inside the same project.

[gbcox]

You are doing a great job with Open Source driver. The "not-yet" is -for me- the main problem, people must wait after buying a Radeon card. It's a bit frustrating.
I know there is ongoing work, and I hope it will be merged upstream in 2018.


I've got an old Radeon HD 6870, using Open Source driver. Sometimes, I want to buy a new card, but I don't know what to do. Vega? No thanks. So I keep this old card.

Agreed, it's a pain but at the moment what you need to do BEFORE you buy an AMD video card is to do some research and make sure it is supported. However, I much rather do the homework and buy the AMD card than give any $$$ at all to NVIDIA. They simply aren't interested in supporting the open source community. Actions speak louder than words and as I mentioned before consumers vote with their $$$.

[andrei_me]

karolherbst how many developers nouveau still have? I can remember only you, ben skeggs, martin peres, ilia mirkin, although I don't know if the others still work on it

[timofonic]

karolherbst how many developers nouveau still have? I can remember only you, ben skeggs, martin peres, ilia mirkin, although I don't know if the others still work on it

What ones hasn't been hired yet to work on other projects? :P

[karolherbst]

What ones hasn't been hired yet to work on other projects? :P

well, ben works on Nouveau for Red Hat.

[karolherbst]

karolherbst how many developers nouveau still have? I can remember only you, ben skeggs, martin peres, ilia mirkin, although I don't know if the others still work on it

There is also pierre, who wants to finish the SPIR-V to nv50ir work to support OpenCL on Nouveau.

But we know that we need to do something here to get more people to work on Nouveau again. I really would like to do an EVoC/GSoC project with somebody as well.

[ssokolow]

I'm still left wondering what prevents Nouveau from reverse-engineering the mechanism the official binary drivers use to upload firmware and then writing and distributing a script which end users can run to extract a firmware image compatible with that mechanism from a copy of the binary driver they downloaded in accordance with nVidia's terms.

[karolherbst]

I'm still left wondering what prevents Nouveau from reverse-engineering the mechanism the official binary drivers use to upload firmware and then writing and distributing a script which end users can run to extract a firmware image compatible with that mechanism from a copy of the binary driver they downloaded in accordance with nVidia's terms.

It doesn't work in any automatic way. Also the firmwares aren't in a way in the driver, where we could easily extract those. Extracting video acceleration firmwares is nothing compared to this.

[imirkin]

I'm still left wondering what prevents Nouveau from reverse-engineering the mechanism the official binary drivers use to upload firmware and then writing and distributing a script which end users can run to extract a firmware image compatible with that mechanism from a copy of the binary driver they downloaded in accordance with nVidia's terms.

Strictly speaking, nothing. There are some technical hurdles, but nothing strictly impossible. We do exactly this for some of the video decoding engine firmware. The technical hurdles have, however, yet to be surmounted. I just don't think there's a lot of interest in it, and the pool of people who can pull it off is dwindling.

[theriddick]

NVIDIA is quite protective of their code and in house source for allot of things, I mean they do have professional organizations using their stuff so I guess they are protecting that component of their business by being so restrictive towards open source.

LETS not forget now that AMD has not released their code for the close source Vulkan driver, basically AMD has been keeping their closed drivers, closed also, but they have the luxury of having a functional open-source option to work on.