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?

[cardpuncher]

Not having the source is the issue :)

Thanks, Linus.

[Lisias]

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