Nvida's latest mark of their newly discovered open-source kindness is beginning to provide open-source hardware reference headers for their latest GK20A/GM20B Tegra GPUs while they are working to also provide hardware header files on their older GPUs. These programming header files in turn will help the development of the open-source Nouveau video driver as up to this point they have had to do much of the development via reverse-engineering.
In order to drive Nouveau as NVIDIA's primary development environment for Tegra, they are looking at adding "official" hardware reference headers to Nouveau. Ken explained, " The headers are derived from the information we use internally. I have arranged the definitions such that the similarities and differences between GPUs is made explicit. I am happy to explain the rationale for any design choices and since I wrote the generator I am able to tweak them in almost any way the community prefers."
So far he has been cleared to provide the programming headers for the GK20A and GM20B. For those concerned this is just an item for driving up future Tegra sales, Ken added, "over the long-term I'm confident any information we need to fill-in functionality >= NV50/G80 will be made public eventually. We just need to go through the internal steps necessary to make that happen."
Perhaps most interesting is that moving forward they would like to use the Nouveau kernel driver code-base as the primary development environment for new hardware. In 2012 Torvalds sent a public "fuck you!" to Nvidia. Also, don't forget Intel and AMD offerings.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday June 25 2015, @09:36PM
If NVIDIA didn't keep moving the goal posts then they would be like Creative Labs. Plenty of their older cards have been reverse engineered and surely copied. Sound cards are very different in that good enough is good enough. We don't need a soundcard that requires active cooling fans that bring the room temperature up two degrees (f) when running. Creative Labs could have gone into audiophile territory before anyone else. Sound cards with vacuum tubes should have been a thing, lol. Not sure what else they could have done?
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(Score: 2) by gman003 on Thursday June 25 2015, @09:58PM
Not only was this actually done, it was done on motherboard integrated audio [neoseeker.com]. Twice [hardwaresecrets.com].