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

[Alexandre Courbot]

On Mon, Oct 31, 2016 at 1:34 AM, Ilia Mirkin <imirkin at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> 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?

Certainly. Actually my first version of 8539b37acef7 did fall back to
the original paths for loading firmware, but Ben suggested that we
just replace the paths entirely, hence the version currently merged:

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2015-June/084914.html

Ben, do you agree with falling back to the old "nouveau/nvxx_fucxxxx"
firmware names so people don't need to move their firmware files
around?