Nvidia Provides Documentation to Nouveau Driver Effort - More In Future

[+Majesticmerc MVC]

Hi Nouveau developers,

NVIDIA is releasing public documentation on certain aspects of our GPUs,

with the intent to address areas that impact the out-of-the-box usability

of NVIDIA GPUs with Nouveau. We intend to provide more documentation

over time, and guidance in additional areas as we are able.

As a first step towards that, we've posted a document here:

ftp://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/DCB/1/DCB-4.0-Specification.html

that documents the Device Control Block ("DCB") layout in the VBIOS.

The DCB describes board topology and the board's display connectors.

I suspect much of the information in that document is not news for

the Nouveau community, but hopefully it will be helpful to confirm your

understanding or flesh out the implementation of a few unhandled cases.

A few of us who work on NVIDIA's proprietary Linux GPU driver will pay

attention to nouveau at lists.freedesktop.org and try to chime in when

we can.

If there are specific areas of documentation that would most help you, that

feedback would help NVIDIA prioritize our documentation efforts.

If you have specific questions for NVIDIA, you can ask here, or direct

them to: open-gpu-doc at nvidia.com. I can't promise we'll be able to answer

everything, but we'll provide best-effort in areas where we are able.

Thanks,

- Andy Ritger

Source: Freedesktop.org via Ars (Maybe NSFW: Linus flipping the bird is the banner image)

This is really great to see alongside their increase in kernel contributions! Maybe a stern telling off is just what Nvidia needed :)

[Karl L.]

This is the most exciting Linux news I have heard in a long time! I really like NVIDIA's hardware, but I have long stayed away from them because of their extremely poor open-source driver support in Linux (which, to be fair, is not at all the fault of the Nouveau developers). Although Intel's open-source graphics driver is by far the best, their GPUs are much weaker than AMD or NVIDIA's, making AMD's graphics cards my only real choice. Now with Intel's newest graphics cards finally achieving decent performance, AMD's new open-source driver and official ISA documentation for their latest graphics cards, and the promise of more cooperation from NVIDIA on open-source driver development for their hardware, I finally feel like I have choices. Now if we could just convince the major ARM SoC vendors to open their graphics implementations...

[+Majesticmerc MVC]

Indeed. I've always been impressed by Intel in this area, it's a shame that their discrete GPU's never made it to market. I'm glad to see these companies finally starting to embrace the FLOSS side of this as well. It always seemed strange that they'd be so diametrically opposed to the open source drivers complimenting their blobs. Good to see them all starting to get along.

I wasn't aware that AMD were offering OSS drivers though. When did this happen?

[Karl L.]

I wasn't aware that AMD were offering OSS drivers though. When did this happen?

 

It is still a work-in-progress, but AMD dropped an official open-source driver for the Radeon HD 7000 and 8000 series cards in February this year. The goal is for this driver - RadeonSI - to live in Linux in parallel with the existing open-source Radeon driver. RadeonSI will provide support for the Radeon HD 7000 series and up while Radeon will continue to provide support for the Radeon HD 6000 series and earlier.

 

RadeonSI release announcement: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI5Mjk

Radeon improvements for Linux 3.12: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQzNTE

Recent RadeonSI benchmarks: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_radeonsi_september&num=1

[soldier1st]

About time. I guess there now seeing the Linux potential, now only if more companies could do that.

[Arceles]

I bet Steam OS will ship with these.... great finally a great media OS.