you don't suppose this came about because steam announced steamOS?
edit: noticed it's in the article.
edit: noticed it's in the article.
1. We are doing this anyway because of Steam OS.
2. Might as well get good community karma for it.
You know this for a fact? It's not that the announcement was made now to gain traction in the Linux community and push forward Nvidia as the graphics company for Linux then?
It surprises me a bit. Too be honest I'd have thought Nvidia would need to document their drivers for internal purposes and that the detail already in the internal documentation would be more than sufficient for the Nouveau team to use. But I'm an outsider to GPU engineering and programming in general really so a misapprehension is quite likely.
>Many more projects are ongoing all over the world and any two of them could at some point make announcements on the same day.
Indeed but you'd expect Nvidia, or similar, to be manoeuvring themselves to align with Steam's announcement.
Just because two things happen on the same day (or within a week of each other, etc) doesn't mean they're closely connected.
Having worked closely with silicon vendors in the past, the situation that there are no internal docs or that the docs are horribly outdated or incorrect compared to the HDL or source code, is pretty common. When the only consumer of docs is an internal team, it's not uncommon for those docs to be nowhere near what an external team would expect or need (or a company would be willing to release without serious cleanup and checking).
You're probably right.
That said your view of PR seems naive. It looks far better to release on social networks that someone found that CompanyN was "already" working on something than it does that there's an official press release. The channel used here - mailing list to social networks - doesn't tell us much IMO.
>it's not uncommon for those docs to be nowhere near what an external team would expect or need //
You think they'd be worse than the nothing that is currently provided by many hardware manufacturers.
One has to wonder about Canonical and Intel falling out recently.