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The reason why Nouveau got stuck is because Nvidia intentionally changed firmware loading process to break Nouveau and not cooperating on providing firmware. Al
by SXX 6y ago
The reason why Nouveau got stuck is because Nvidia intentionally changed firmware loading process to break Nouveau and not cooperating on providing firmware. Also part of the problem is that main Nouveau developers are from Red Hat and they are limited in terms of RE of actual Nvidia code. Unfortunately some of Nouveau contributors dropped their efforts once Nvidia began to be actively hostile to the project.
If you look at GPUs like GTX 650 they actually almost have feature-parity and 90% of performance. I personally used GT710 on my PC and while it super-low-end card it's really decent under Nouveau and can drive 3 of 2K displays with 75Hz and lag-free.
As for Apple hardware it's different at least because Marcan isn't as limited in terms of keeping source code purity. After all Apple dont have any Linux drivers so there is no way to RE any code that can be directly applied to Linux graphics stack.
- ungamed 6y agoIt would be very possible and also related to RE code from the OSX stack though.
- SXX 6y agoMarcan had this topic covered on his stream. While reverse enginering is always gray area there is a lot of device drivers in Linux kernel tree that was created using RE. Also Apple never sued anyone for doing this. Developer funded by community has more freedom than Red Hat employee. There is simply no profit for hardware vendor in attacking him. Also OSX graphics stack is completely different from Linux one and Apple only implement their own proprietary Metal API. So even if you gonna decompile Apple drivers chances of copying Apple code are very small since the only common part would be running compilee code on the GPU.