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NVIDIA Begins Supplying Open-Source Register Header Files

Posted by samzenpus on from the opening-it-up dept.

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.

9 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. What's the score now? by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Bruce Perens.
    1. Re:What's the score now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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)

    2. Re:What's the score now? by Pi1grim · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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).

    3. Re:What's the score now? by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Bruce Perens.
    4. Re:What's the score now? by hairyfeet · · Score: 3, Informative

      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?

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    5. Re:What's the score now? by cardpuncher · · Score: 5, Funny

      Not having the source is the issue :)

  2. Thanks, Linus. by Lisias · · Score: 4, Funny

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

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    Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
  3. Re:Oh, sure, Tegra by CurryCamel · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:What's their fear with that? by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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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