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Clean-room reverse engineering is specifically not forbidden, and has been successfully done in the past to develop the Nouveau driver. Disassembling Nvidia's b
by samus 3y ago
Clean-room reverse engineering is specifically not forbidden, and has been successfully done in the past to develop the Nouveau driver. Disassembling Nvidia's binaries is plausibly forbidden, but it would be very surprising if they could extend that ban on binaries produced by their compiler. However, the trademark could be used to attack statements about the emulation layer. I see parallels to Google vs. Oracle
- salawat 3y agoNote Nouveau is dead in the water due to DMCA 1201, plus Nvidia's use of secrutful FALCON units to cryptographically verify firmware signatures.
- samus 3y agoRecently, development has picked up again though. They basically surrendered and now use the proprietary blob. The Mesa driver supports Vulkan 1.3 and Zink will be used for OpenGL going forward. Now on to more performance optimization and maybe bringing up some of the other proprietary IP blocks...
- salawat 3y agoRealistically, all that means is that Nouveau is giving in to the death of rights of First Sale, which is a fight I'm not willing to give up on fighting for yet even if every deep pocketed interest and it's sister seems to be swinging that way.
- samus 3y agoI don't completely get your point I fear. Using the blob is simply accepting the fact that the cards are hamstrung without it. They won that round. Let's hope that AMD and Intel eventually get it together and come up with products that can slowly erode Nvidia's moat.
- anticensor 3y agoFirst sale is not a thing in my country. Resale defaults to forbidden, and when allowed by original creator, is simply subject to the same royalty and licence protections as initial sale of the copyrighted work. Clean room reverse engineering is however allowed.
- gpderetta 3y agoInteresting, which country? edit: Never mind.
- anticensor 3y agoMy home country, Turkey. We also have a vignette system for books (books are an exception to the resale royalties, as long as resold copies bear the vignette; never-sold works and school textbooks are exempt from the vignette system) and compulsory registration for video games.
- kmeisthax 3y agoTo those wondering what salawat is talking about: a while back Nvidia started signing the firmware that loads onto the auxiliary processors on their GPUs. Nouveau asked Nvidia for a minimal signed blob they could legally redistribute and load but was basically ghosted by Nvidia. Without that blob they can only drive the GPU at minimum power, which is often worse than Intel integrated graphics. The bit about DMCA 1201 is mostly hypothetical. i.e. Nvidia's code signing looks like a DRM scheme if you squint. If Nvidia really wanted to, they could argue that, say, cracking the code signing is illegal no matter what you do with it. My gut feeling is that the courts probably wouldn't be too keen on Nvidia suing over this in the case of, say, someone writing their own power management firmware and using an exploit to load it onto a GPU. DMCA 1201 is supposed to prevent you from copying other people's work, not writing your own. All of this is a moot point because Nvidia more recently released an "open source driver" that loads a single unified firmware blob. This has allowed building a new driver called NVK, which aside from having to load said blob is FOSS, and actually usable for Nvidia GPUs.