It's one thing to hide Verilog it's another to stuff huge binary in my kernel

It's one thing to hide Verilog it's another to stuff huge binary in my kernel

Posted Jun 26, 2008 18:45 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews) by engineer_1
Parent article: Nvidia Reiterates Position on Closed Source Driver (OSnews)

However, open source is not an issue for these users; they only care about results: does it work, can it be supported.

The question is support, of course. RedHat will not offer you support if you are using binary driver. Ditto for kernel developers. The same for many-many other people. It's quite clear and consistent stance: Linux is free, you can stuff it with binary wireless drivers or graphic drivers but don't come with questions and bugreports in this case.

When was the last time you were able to read the Verilog RTL that explains how Intel's CPU's work, for example.

Looks like you are diliberately confusing things. It's one thing to request verilog - may be it'll be useful, but it's not needed to program chip, only to build it. It's another thing to request documentation - this is a must and Intel's CPU documentation was always very good. nVidia noes not offer anything at all - not even chip interfaces! And with things like CUDA it starts to look more and more like another proprietary OS in the control of your computer. Thnx but no thnx. AMD and Intel now offer quite good documentation and looks like AMD offers good performance as well so there are noreason to stick with nVidia at all. You can expect even less tolerance to the users who are using nVidia drivers from now on.

---

(Log in to post comments)

Sorry about the confusion; I'm lately finding that reading the RTL for our chip designs in my
own company is the only way to figure out what the crazy hardware guys are up to...

Anyway, you raise a good point: NVIDIA's documentation has always been their weakest point,
assuming you can even find the documentation. I should mention, however, that they do have a
public, documented SDK, and a huge variety of companies are using it to create their own
(proprietary, usually!) applications. The medical industry, for example, has some interesting
high-end, super high resolution flat panels, with drivers that they wrote, using NVIDIA SDK
APIs. Likewise for the movie industry, and so on.