NVIDIA Begins Supplying Open-Source Register Header Files

An anonymous reader writes: NVIDIA's latest mark of their newly discovered open-source kindness is beginning to provide open-source hardware reference headers for their latest GK20A/GM20B Tegra GPUs while they are working to also provide hardware header files on their older GPUs. These programming header files in turn will help the development of the open-source Nouveau driver as up to this point they have had to do much of the development via reverse-engineering. Perhaps most interesting is that moving forward they would like to use the Nouveau kernel driver code-base as the primary development environment for new hardware.

Comments

Re:Oh, sure, Tegra

[CurryCamel]

Sampling a few of the device's in your link, GP's claim that the devices can't be bought still seems to hold true, mostly.
For example, of the devices on the first page you link to:

Can't ship out of the US:
-Acer Chromebook 13 CB5-311-T1UU
-Acer Chromebook 13 CB5-311-T7NN
-NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet
-EVGA Tegra Note 7
-Nabi Big Tab (24")

Can be bought:
-NVIDIA SHIELD Portable
-Google Nexus 9

Dead link:
-HP Chromebook 14 G3

No wonder nVidia can't sell them, if people cannot buy them... I wonder if there is something in the Tegra itself that causes this, or if the link provided was just a happy coincidence to confirm GP's gut feel.

Re:What's the score now?

[hairyfeet]

Citation please? Because the last press release I saw from AMD on the subject said they were releasing docs as fast as the lawyer could sign off on them and that they hoped to replace their binary blob in the future with the FOSS driver. To that end they had gone so far as to hire a couple extra devs to work on the FOSS drivers to help them get closer to release parity.

Now I can understand why you will never have certain features supported by the FOSS drivers, why? AMD doesn't own the rights and thus has no legal way of releasing that code, for example HDMI with HDCP is owned by Intel and I'm sure their codecs are covered by the MPEG-LA patents but from what I understood AMD has been releasing all their docs not affected by others patents including the APUs which I would assume to be of most benefit to Linux users. Have they changed their position?