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

[Ilia Mirkin]

On Mon, Oct 31, 2016 at 2:31 AM, Alexandre Courbot <gnurou at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

The theory was that the nouveau fw was going to be sufficient for
pre-GM200 chips. Practice hasn't lived up to that - a ton of people
with a GTX 660's have issues with the nouveau fw being unstable, whose
issues are fixed by the extracted firmware from the blob.

  -ilia