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 kaszz on Thursday June 25 2015, @10:29PM
You mean by withholding information on older cards they can make people to throw them away and buy new? :p
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2015, @04:21PM
If it makes them throw away old NVidia cards and buy new AMD cards, it doesn't help NVidia the slightest.