[Nouveau] [PREVIEW] GM200/GM204 signed firmware for Nouveau
Alexandre Courbot
acourbot at nvidia.com
Mon Feb 15 08:40:49 UTC 2016
Hi everyone,
I know, it's about f**king time and I apologize for the time it took us
to finally put this together. m(__)m
I have pushed two git branches which enable GM200 and GM204 (GM206 to
follow soon) owners to finally load NVIDIA-provided signed firmware and
start GR:
- https://github.com/Gnurou/linux-firmware/tree/secboot contains the
signed firmware for GM200 and GM204 (they are mostly the same). For each
chip, "gr" contains the signed firmware for GR, and "acr" the signed
firmware loader. ACR stands for Access Controlled Regions and is a
secure firmware that runs on the PMU and is responsible for setting up a
write-protected (WPR) region in VRAM where the other signed firmware can
be verified and loaded without anyone tampering it. The ACR itself is
also signed and verified by the hardware. More details on the signed
firmware loading process can be found at
ftp://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/Falcon-Security/1/Falcon-Security.html
.
This ACR binary is currently custom-built for Nouveau and allows to only
load GR. This means that other falcons which require signed firmware
(like PMU) cannot be used as of now. Our goal is to eventually have
Nouveau use the same firmware as our own driver (RM), but this will take
some more work. One of the obstacles being that since RM embeds the
firmware, both can safely evolve in lockstep, while in the context of
Nouveau we must make sure older kernels remain supported forever and
either avoid incompatible changes or manage different firmware versions.
- https://github.com/Gnurou/nouveau/tree/secboot is a Nouveau branch
capable of loading the signed firmware. The patches are mostly in good
shape and I hope that they will be merged once we iron out the last
details about the firmware format, hopefully in time for 4.6. I still
have issues with suspend/resume (module unload/reload works fine though)
but hope to sort this out soon.
To test this, checkout my linux-firmware secboot branch and copy it to
/lib/firmware, then build Nouveau from the secboot branch of my repo and
load it. If your console switches to nouveaufb and you don't see Nouveau
complaining about ACR boot failing, congratulations! GR is now ready to
work. You won't go much further though unless you can add support for
Maxwell 2 into Mesa - but the changes for basic support are rather
modest, and hopefully this pre-release will be enough to enable patches
to land in Mesa.
An official submit to linux-firmware will happen once we agree on the
final firmware format and the kernel code is good to go. For now, please
consider these branches as work-in-progress and do not distribute them
or embed them anywhere to avoid compatiblity issues. Also update both
together I as will heavily rebase in the next few days.
So while we have still some work ahead, this at least unlocks a very
unpleasant situation for everyone, and we will take further steps to
keep improving it.
Please test, hack Mesa, and comment on the kernel code so that we can
get all this in time for 4.6! :)
Cheers,
Alex.
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