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NVIDIA to provide documentation for NouveauNVIDIA to provide documentation for NouveauPosted Sep 25, 2013 8:21 UTC (Wed) by tdz (subscriber, #58733)In reply to: NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau by rengolin Parent article: NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau
Valve has been very vocal about their love for free graphics drivers when porting a game to Linux, and NVIDIA must have noticed this. They may have decided to open up a bit to not lose developer support in the long run.
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NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 25, 2013 13:19 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Well I think it probably has a hell of a lot more to do with the fact that Linux and everybody else is now moving to kernel-level modesetting.
Nvidia cares that people's Nvidia Linux systems boot with the same reliability and features that you can get from other graphics cards.
If they have to work around Linux KMS fuck-ups in their binary driver due to the fact that the Linux devs can't quite reverse engineer things correctly then that will make life for them and their customers harder then it needs to be.
NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 25, 2013 20:25 UTC (Wed) by tdz (subscriber, #58733) [Link]
I'm sorry, but I don't understand your point. To my knowledge NVIDIA doesn't use KMS in their proprietary driver. They have a completely separate graphics stack in the kernel. So why would they be affected by problems in Linux' KMS. Also why would they start caring about this now and not 5 years ago, when KMS was new?
If it's not for Steam, I could imaging that they want support for Wayland without committing resources for maintaining a KMS driver. Supporting nouveau with documentation is the next best option then.
NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 27, 2013 14:35 UTC (Fri) by Lovechild (subscriber, #3592) [Link]
The problem nvidia is facing is that distributions will be or is using boot splashes and/X technology that relies on KMS. They could at best screw up only a boot splash but the pain just grows.
If they inplement KMS support in their driver they will at least subject that part to the GPL2 clause relating to derived work. Effectively meaning at least the parts KMS support touches would have to be under the GPL2 like the Linux kernel. Nvidia really don't want that, likely for legal reasons. E.g. they might not be absolutely sure all their code base is licensed as to allow them to open source it, in cases of code that comes along with buying another company. The answer might simply be a complicated, expensive "we don't know for sure, better not".
Button line expect nvidia to be able to play this many ways. Initially it might allow them to easily run on modern Linux distributions with their existing code. Long term it might allow them to move some parts more in the open if that makes sense for them (e.g. the way Intel's Graphics drivers work in many ways)
NVIDIA to provide documentation for Nouveau Posted Sep 27, 2013 15:47 UTC (Fri) by Wol (guest, #4433) [Link]
Iirc Valve had a major problem somewhere.
And they said it was just great being able to debug the ENTIRE stack, and FIX the problem rather than just work round a problem in someone else's code.
Cheers,
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