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

What's the score now?

[Bruce Perens]

We have nVidia helping but not making their own Open Source driver. Intel, after a long period of Open Drivers, said it would require BLOBs for future graphical interfaces. AMD helps with Open Drivers more than nVidia so far but doesn't support them.

Re:What's the score now?

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Re:What's the score now?

[Pi1grim]

Blob used to be stored in ROM part on the die, upgraded from time to time. Now they'll store in drivers directly and load it into the hardware on initialization. Intel didn't close anything, they just revealed the same blob that used to be hidden from the eyes and included it into driver. So, I'd say that's not Intel creating a problem, merely exposing it. Also, perhaps now that everyone has suddenly got their panties in a bunch over this issue, Intel might consider opensourcing the blob as well (in case publicity benefits will outweigh the work needed).

Re:What's the score now?

[Bruce Perens]

If they actually told us how to program their microengines, something good might come of it. But they'll probably just BSD-license a list of numbers, as others have.

I liked writing bit-slice microcode at Pixar. I really could get every last bit of power out of the hardware.

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?

Re:What's the score now?

[cardpuncher]

Not having the source is the issue :)

Oh, sure, Tegra

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Thanks, Linus.

[Lisias]

A well said "fuck you" does wonders! :-)

Re:What's their fear with that?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

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.

Re:What's their fear with that?

[drinkypoo]

In all these years I've been wondering why they are so jealous about their drivers. I know, it's a very complicated matter of APIs, exposing internal details, etc.

nVidia doesn't own a lot of the IP in their mainstream graphics cards. Tesla is a separate development, and they do own most of the GPU IP in there, so they can release the specs. But nVidia got deeply into bed with Microsoft in the NV2x era. They got insider information on Direct3D, which they used to guide geforce development, and they got their chip into the original Xbox, but they also wound up beholden to Microsoft. They have never outright come out and said that, but they've strongly implied it, and it makes sense.