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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.
Approximately zero people actually use Tegra in real life, which is probably the whole reason that this was authorized. Every generation they make huge noise about how awesome the new Tegra is, then it ships in maybe 5 or 6 devices, half of which can't actually be bought anywhere.
Adding a closed source firmware blob has very little to do with closed source drivers. Intel is not making their drivers closed source. All the x86 regular old CPU code (AKA the driver) is still open. Sure theres is some closed source stuff now, but I suspect there isn't even a compiler publicly available that could compile what ever they have for its source, and that code isn't at all relevant to other devices.
Would their driver magically become open again if that blob lived in factory loaded microcode you couldn't change? That would be less open, and back to no blob. The blob isn't necessarily evil here, you need to look at the larger picture.
If you just want to hate on intel though, I recommend targeting their monopolistic actions. Intel really pisses me off in a lot of ways, but please at least respect their great work on open source graphics drivers: its one of the few great things they have done (them contributing an OpenMP run-time to LLVM was another nice thing: they arn't pure evil)
ATI and nVidia try to compete for share. They have high-payed repstrying to convince companies making the games used in the benchmarks to use features that favor their cards over their competitions'. I can see publicizing the drivers leading to the discovery of new holes that screw up a specific card getting pushed.
Security by obscurity is not a replacement for real security, but it helps in this narrow case.
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