NVIDIA Begins Supplying Open-Source Register Header Files 77
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.
What's the score now? (Score:5, 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.
Re:What's the score now? (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)
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powertop?
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Re:What's the score now? (Score:5, Funny)
Cheap stab against RMS's stance (Score:1)
> Would their driver magically become open again if that blob lived in factory loaded microcode you couldn't change?
This is the usual cheap stab against RMS's stance. The truth is... it's just more complicated.
- On the one hand (1) there's your position: firmware can be fixed for bugs, new blob, hardware works now. And there's hope to reverse-engineer all that (far harder "inner") stuff, potentially opening a new avenue, if you're willing to ignore all the scary warnings on the package.
- On the other han
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This is the usual cheap stab against RMS's stance
One could argue that this is the usual cheap stab of RMS against hardware manufacturer. Hardware firmware is meant to be embedded in a piece of hardware, think microcontrollers that power everything today, and 99% of times you don't even know there are so many of them in a device.
Re:What's the score now? (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).
Re:What's the score now? (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.
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One of the hardest lessons I ever learned in this business is that if you tell a customer (often any customer) about it, you support it. It does not matter in the slightest whether it's officially documented or not.
I learned this lesson long before I started reading Raymond Chen's blog, which is full of examples.
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Hardware is cheaper than programmers 99% of the time.
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What type of GPUs does Pixar use? Is it still the A113?
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I didn't actually work on GPUs very much at Pixar, the image computer I worked on was the grandfather of the SIMD image processing instructions on modern CPUs. What would become a GPU later on was a very expensive box from Silicon Graphics, I had one that cost at least a quarter Million dollars.
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Whatever it has been used for subsequently, A113 is a classroom at Cal Arts.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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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.
Well no, not really. They're hoping to replace the base infrastructure on Linux with the open source "amdgpu" driver, but with separate open and closed source user mode drivers for OpenGL, multimedia and so on. It would get you up to release parity if all you need is a framebuffer and software fallback, but they are still planning to develop Mesa and Catalyst separately. They don't have any plans to give Intel a free high performance OpenGL engine or to let nVidia look at their game-specific optimizations.
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I'm an Open-Source advocate, don't get me wrong.
However, they are under no obligation whatsoever, so why should they? What advantage do they get from opening them? What's going to be the thing that will make them want to open their drivers? What's going to outweigh potential patent etc. risks?
Because, as far as I can see, they gain basically nothing. They might get a "good news" article or two but it won't increase their sales significantly at all.
Are we still in the era of hoping that huge multinationa
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Could be used on more operating systems doesn't translate to more sales.
And it's not "without them having to do anything". Just patent/copyright-auditing the proprietary driver they had in order to open-source would probably wipe out any extra sales they gained alone. Let alone ongoing maintenance, catering for all the Linux kernel changes as they try to get it accepted into the kernel for several years, bus-changes, new versions of CUDA / OpenGL translations etc.
Honestly, look into the costs. They would
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Oh, sure, Tegra (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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Not so.
There are more devices out there than you think:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/t... [nvidia.com]
Re:Oh, sure, Tegra (Score:4, 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.
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Hmmm... Maybe you/GP is right.
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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
Right, those are likely American models. My model in Germany has a different model number (it's a Full HD, 4 GB RAM model, BTW). I have it since October 2, 2014.
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Thanks, Linus. (Score:5, Funny)
A well said "fuck you" does wonders! :-)
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The very idea Nvidia or any other company, group, or individual should give a fuck what Linus says is laughable. That said, someone definitely needs to tell Linus to go fuck himself.
Well, if they want to sell Tegra devices then they probably do care a little about what Linus thinks, since his kernel powers... all of them.
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Well, can't count on an anonymous coward to do it. Luckily what you say also doesn't matter.
What's their fear with that? (Score:1)
Or are they afraid that a cheap manufacturer could use their precious drivers with a cheap, compatible card? But if their hardware is better than th
Re:What's their fear with that? (Score:4, 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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Could you perhaps find a synonym for effete? I'm asking this with the utmost sincerity because looking at your post history I think that your use of the word has become, well, effete.
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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 i
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1) They license other companies intellectual property. They can't just willy-nilly make all of their drivers' source code public.
2) A decade ago, NVIDIA other companies were so competitive, they were concerned that revealing their driver source code could reveal their hardware tricks to speed up graphics performance. Then their competitors could reverse-engineer the detail in their next generation card, and "catch up" to NVIDIA's performance. Luckily, they may be finally realizing that they get more of
Okay so.... Physx on Mac then? (Score:2)
A fellow can dream.
Why bother... (Score:1)
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Haven't used Linux for ages. Under Windows I can have a deluxe NVIDIA driver installed right now.
The blob has the same performance in linux as in windows, games generally yield the same performance too, except for some that use a wrapper without decent optimization. See here for a januari test - http://www.phoronix.com/scan.p... [phoronix.com] The nvidia header file releases discussed in this article and their future plans might boost the opensource driver linux though, which performs badly.
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Kudos for sticking with Linux, but you should be bright enough to figure out that this the "price" you pay for using Linux. The price of "anarchy" is that the community chooses its leaders; there is no "vetting" or removal procedure. Basically, things have to get XFree86 bad before something gets done about it. Your whining about the "proletarian coders' paradise" falls on deaf ears, much like the Soviet Union. Hell, there aren't even Linux (not RMS) evangelists that will bother to raise the battle fl
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