On the possible merging of Nouveau

Posted Dec 11, 2009 19:46 UTC (Fri) by koriakin (guest, #62470)
Parent article: On the possible merging of Nouveau

The blob situation is actually not as bad as it sounds. When mentioning the blobs, more properly called ctxprogs, it seems customary to call them "voodoo" and say "may or may not be firmware, who knows". This is not true anymore, we know a lot about ctxprogs these days, including their purpose [context switching], what they do [save/restore PGRAPH state], and most of their opcodes. There are still some unknowns that prevent us from writing new ctxprogs from scratch right now, but we're working on that and it *will* be resolved in the proper way. Which is throwing out nvidia's progs and writing our own prog generator. If you want to learn more about ctxprogs, http://0x04.net/cgit/index.cgi/nv50dis/tree/ctxdis.c

On the possible merging of Nouveau

Posted Dec 11, 2009 20:05 UTC (Fri) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

Neat stuff! There's so much good progress here.

It's just too bad it's despite nVidia, instead of with their help.

On the possible merging of Nouveau

Posted Dec 13, 2009 2:48 UTC (Sun) by MarkWilliamson (guest, #30166) [Link] (1 responses)

Is the blob needed for the card to operate at all or e.g. just for 3D
accelerated operation? If it's absolutely necessary then I am surprised
that Fedora distributed it without it's copyright status being known. But
it's a step on the road to a fully open stack for NVidia cards so I think
the work you're doing is excellent.

On the possible merging of Nouveau

Posted Dec 13, 2009 18:12 UTC (Sun) by koriakin (guest, #62470) [Link]

The ctxprogs are needed to make any use out of PGRAPH, which is the card's acceleration engine. Without them, there's no acceleration, not even 2D, but normal display, KMS, and suspend/resume works just fine.