Nouveau regression since kernel 4.3: loading NVIDIA's firwmare files

Ilia Mirkin imirkin at alum.mit.edu
Sun Oct 30 16:34:35 UTC 2016


Hi Alex,

As you're well-aware, your commit
8539b37acef73949861a16808b60cb8b5b9b3bab (drm/nouveau/gr: use
NVIDIA-provided external firmwares) broke tons of existing setups for
people who were using extracted firmware files (stored in the
"nouveau" firmware directory) as a result of nouveau's ctxsw fw being
... lacking. This is especially common on GK106's for some reason.

The arguments for doing this at the time was that (a) all the bugs in
nouveau's fw have been fixed and thus those people don't need to be
using those extracted firmware files and (b) NVIDIA was going to
release firmware and so things would Just Work (tm) since the new
files would be at the new locations.

Neither of these have come to fruition. Plenty of people still have
GK106's that don't work well with nouveau's fw. NVIDIA has shown no
interest in releasing firmware in a redistributable fashion.

Can you please create a patch to fix this up so that it still tries to
load files from the previous location with the previous names so that
people's previously-working setups can keep on working?

Thanks,

  -ilia


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