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Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

Hell is freezing?

Serious, does it means we won't need Nouveau anymore? How many and which binary blobs it still needs? Are they encrypted or require signing?

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From the linked article:

> The current codebase does not conform to the Linux kernel design conventions and is not a candidate for Linux upstream. [...]

> In the meantime, published source code serves as a reference to help improve the Nouveau driver. Nouveau can leverage the same firmware used by the NVIDIA driver, exposing many GPU functionalities, such as clock management and thermal management, bringing new features to the in-tree Nouveau driver.

Nouveau is still needed because Nvidia's drivers do not conform to Linux kernel standards, so they can't be upstreamed. Nouveau is conforming, so it still has a reason to exist. Fortunately Nouveau can more easily improve by using Nvidia's now-open source as a reference.

Nouveau is still needed if you want open-source userland; the new nvidia open source thingy is only kernel-side and presumably works only with their own userspace drivers.

> presumably works only with their own userspace drivers.

For now, the plan is to replicate the way AMD drivers

Work, with having shared firmware but separate user lands, one closed and the other libre(MESA for AMD, Nouveau++ for nvidia?)

More details here from Red hats Christian schaller

https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2022/05/11/why-is-the-open-so...

It means Nouveau will finally can get good I think.

Nope, nouveau is still hosed because they've been blocked ny Nvidia's secrutful FALCON's which have the reclocking and power management API's locked away behind proprietary firmware blobs.

This new driver targets GPUs with FALCON, and nouveau will be able to control it, as FALCON is GSP (https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-R...).

They're likely changing it because security researchers pwned FALCON.

There is a way to leak the hash against which High Security mode FALCON compares the microcode for signature validation.

So hopefully you'll forgive me if I maintain my skepticism over this being anything but Nvidia iterating to close a massive security defeat by redesigning their FALCON controller to mitigate the thorough pwning that's been achieved.

I don't doubt there are other improvements, I just think the timing is pretty darn convenient, especially for being in the midst of a semiconductor shortage for going and doing a massive manufacturing change like that.

Reading the hash doesn’t sound like much of a flaw to me, could you elaborate or provide a link?

nvidia switched away from FALCON to RISC-V.

Currently no, the driver is alpha code at this point.

But the goal is to create a complete open source stack like MESA for AMD.

Also its only for Turing and newer (GTX 16XX+) https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2022/05/11/why-is-the-open-so...

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