[Nouveau] offer to help, DCB

[Dave Airlie]

On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 10:34 AM, Andy Ritger <aritger at nvidia.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 24, 2013 at 12:43:46PM -0700, Dave Airlie wrote:
> ...
>>
>> Hey Andy,
>>
>> this is great news,
>>
>> I suppose the question I have is there any known upfront limits on
>> what you can release or is it going to be a per-request type thing?
>
> Hi Dave.
>
> I think we're going to have to deal with things on a case-by-case basis.
> I wouldn't take anything off the table, yet.  You all can probably
> imagine what areas may have IP/security/whatever entanglements, which
> will be more painful for NVIDIA to sort through.  But, for now, just
> enumerate what information would be most useful.  The more specific and
> targeted the request, the more focused (and hopefully efficient) the
> internal vetting process can be.

Cool good to know.
>
> For microcode: from NVIDIA's perspective, I think we'd like to move to
> a model where NVIDIA releases microcode firmware (as binary-only) with a
> defined ABI, versioning, and reasonable licensing to allow redistribution.
> We have some release engineering process improvements to make there, since
> today the firmware is allowed to evolve along side the NVIDIA proprietary
> driver code, and the two are released in lock-step.  But longer-term,
> I think we'd like to move things to the firmware that either we're not
> comfortable documenting, or things that are Real Hard to get right,
> like P-state switching.
>
> Does Nouveau reimplement Falcon microcode due to particular deficiencies
> in NVIDIA's microcode, or because you couldn't get permission in the past
> to redistribute the firmware extracted from NVIDIA's proprietary driver?
> If the latter, I think we can get to the point of solving that with more
> amenable licensing.  If the former, I'd like to report the deficiencies
> from your point of view back to NVIDIA's firmware team, so that we can
> improve the firmware for Nouveau use.

The initial reason for rewriting microcode was that lack of
redistribution rights and how distros like RHEL would work out of the
box.

I don't think the nouveau microcode is doing anything exotic compared
to the nvidia stuff, its probably a lot simpler, and I'm sure there
would be some resistance to moving to using the closed blobs only, but
there it might be good enough for most people if we could do what AMD
do and have a fallback open source microcode for the other cases,
though I'm just speaking as RHEL maintainer and watching how much time
Ben spends RE'ing microcode :-_

Dave.