On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 2:49 PM, Pekka Paalanen <p...@iki.fi> wrote: > The big question is what we call ctxprogs: binary blobs that are > clearly executable, running somewhere in the GPU. No-one seems > to know, if those are copyrightable, or if they can be redistributed. > In their current form, they have been recorded from the nvidia > proprietary driver using mmiotrace, and copied verbatim for each > card type. > > Would you be willing to pull that kind of stuff into Linux? > > I would not even dare sending them to the Linux firmware > repository, since they have some license requirements, too.
This seems similar to the unfortunate situation with the b43 wireless card firmware. Broadcom refuses to provide the firmware under a redistributable license (or even as files separate from their proprietary drivers). This did not stop b43 from being included in Linux. Distributions have dealt with it by providing a script that downloads the proprietary driver and extracts the firmware from it to files in /lib/firmware. Do you think that a similar solution for nouveau would be legally problematic? Or is the issue technical, since you mention that the ctxprogs were obtained by mmiotrace, instead of a more straightforward extraction from the binary driver blobs? -- Will Dyson ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Return on Information: Google Enterprise Search pays you back Get the facts. http://p.sf.net/sfu/google-dev2dev -- _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
