Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

Nvidia Begins Supplying Open-Source Register Header Files

posted by janrinok on Thursday June 25 2015, @06:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the one-step-at-a-time dept.

kaszz writes:

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.

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Nvidia Begins Supplying Open-Source Register Header Files | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 40 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 26 2015, @10:32AM

    by kaszz (4211) on Friday June 26 2015, @10:32AM (#201462) Journal

    If they try to keep instruction sets secret when delving into the generic CPU area. They will have a problem..

    Would be nice if sellers started with a sticker [Nvidia free]. ;)

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   2  

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2015, @04:32PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2015, @04:32PM (#201574)

    So Intel does publish the microcode instruction set of their CPUs? I don't think so.

  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday June 29 2015, @08:40AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Monday June 29 2015, @08:40AM (#202694) Journal
    As the other poster points out, x86 vendors do this: their CPUs translate x86 instructions into something totally undocumented (and do optimisations at this level, fusing micro-ops from different instructions into single micro-ops and even doing some quite clever things like recognising memcpy idioms). There's no real difference for nVidia doing this. It's quite nice to keep the real ISA secret, because it means that you can change it periodically. IBM has done this with their mainframes quite explicitly since the '60s, with a public ISA that's completely decoupled from the implementation.
    --
    sudo mod me up