4 ms·

Nouveau is a highly capable open source driver for NVIDIA GPUs based on reverse-engineering. For some older card generations (e.g. GTX 600 series) it was compe

by mappu 6y ago

Nouveau is a highly capable open source driver for NVIDIA GPUs based on reverse-engineering. For some older card generations (e.g. GTX 600 series) it was competitive with the official driver. But in every hardware generation since then, the GPU requires signed firmware in order to run at any decent clock speed. The necessary signed firmware is present inside the proprietary driver, but nouveau can't load it because it's against the ToS to redistribute it. Most GPU features are available but run at 0.1x speed or slower because of this single reason. Nvidia could absolutely fix this "tomorrow" if they were motivated. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-Mesa-Volta-Turing-MR https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-...

fluffything 6y ago
Wow, that does suck. Imagine them doing the same thing with ARM.
salawat 6y ago
Solution: Download the Nvidia blob, isolate the binary firmware, extract, load. Be fun? Absolutely not. Desperate times and inconsciable acts of legalism call for equally extreme levels of overly contrived legalism circumvention. At this point I've gotten so bloody tired of the games people play with IP, that I'm arriving at the point I think I wouldn't even mind being part of the collateral damage of our industry being burned to the ground through the complete dissolution of any software delivered or related contract. If you sell me hardware, and play shenanigans to keep me from being able to use it to it's fullest capability, you're violating the intent of the rights of First Sale. To be honest, I think every graphics card should have to be sold bundled with enough information for a layperson (or I'll throw out a bone,a reasonably adept engineer) to write their own hardware driver/firmware. Without that requirement, this industry will never change.

by mappu 6y ago

fluffything 6y ago

Wow, that does suck. Imagine them doing the same thing with ARM.

salawat 6y ago

Solution: Download the Nvidia blob, isolate the binary firmware, extract, load. Be fun? Absolutely not. Desperate times and inconsciable acts of legalism call for equally extreme levels of overly contrived legalism circumvention. At this point I've gotten so bloody tired of the games people play with IP, that I'm arriving at the point I think I wouldn't even mind being part of the collateral damage of our industry being burned to the ground through the complete dissolution of any software delivered or related contract. If you sell me hardware, and play shenanigans to keep me from being able to use it to it's fullest capability, you're violating the intent of the rights of First Sale. To be honest, I think every graphics card should have to be sold bundled with enough information for a layperson (or I'll throw out a bone,a reasonably adept engineer) to write their own hardware driver/firmware. Without that requirement, this industry will never change.