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Top-level
@LunaFoxgirlVT @marcan @G33KatWork @tnt @kkarhan @lina the open driver only fixes nvidia's issue of no longer being able to cheat and get access to GPL-only kernel services. which they need for cuda the other thing they had to fix is make the fw redistributable, which was the total killer before it's still a giantic mess because they don't do any kind of reasonable fw api versioning, which means doing a real linux driver with all the features in upstream is still very hard, and unecessarily so 8 comments
@marcan @LunaFoxgirlVT @G33KatWork @tnt @kkarhan @lina you don't need to load it from linux (so no lolz with redistribution rights) and I thought in the bootloader entry you can spec which one you want, so that you don't have to support them all? at least it sounded somewhat reasonable nvidia didn't even do that for years, until they where forced because the kernel's module loader got stricter with enforcing GPL-only module access, and that broke cuda  @sima @LunaFoxgirlVT @G33KatWork @tnt @kkarhan @lina We pick the supported versions and our installer only offers those, but if it's loaded by Linux itself then you should also be able to restrict the set of supported versions, right? @marcan @LunaFoxgirlVT @G33KatWork @tnt @kkarhan @lina yes maybe it's just me being extremely biased because nvidia has a track record of maximally screwing over the open drivers, but gut feeling is that the nvidia way sounds a lot more messy like from what I've heard apple's design seems pretty settled, which helps. nvidia's is a first cut because they panicked and try way to hard to hide stuff in the fw, and some things will need to drastically change at least for compute in upstream @sima @LunaFoxgirlVT @G33KatWork @tnt @kkarhan @lina Yeah, I don't know if it's good or bad but at least for us we *know* we're getting whatever Apple does on macOS and there isn't any room for asking for something else, so the path forward is clear regardless of how easy or hard it is. @marcan @LunaFoxgirlVT @G33KatWork @tnt @kkarhan @lina yeah I guess my worry is that nvidia has a track record of actively making the open stack harder than necessary, and some of the things suggest the new open driver + new fw blob is going to be a repeat apple seems to just not care and so more design things in a way that makes sense instead of trying real hard to make the gpl'ed kernel driver as small as possible (now that impossible is out), whether that makes sense or not technically  @sima @marcan @LunaFoxgirlVT @G33KatWork @tnt @lina *nodds in agreement* @marcan @LunaFoxgirlVT @G33KatWork @tnt @kkarhan @lina at least in my experience nothing good ever comes out of designing fw when your principle is to hide all your "vendor value add" in it and move it out of the gpl'ed kernel driver I've seen that in other places than nvidia, and it's absolute pain. and from what I've heard, this "hide it all in fw and use the kernel as the new shim to get access to gpl stuff" is absolutely their plan that's also why the fw is ginormous |
Gregory's Server
@sima @LunaFoxgirlVT @G33KatWork @tnt @kkarhan @lina To be fair Apple also aren't doing any FW API versioning, and we're dealing with it anyway :P