On Fri, 2010-03-26 at 18:43 +0100, Sven Joachim wrote: > On 2010-03-26 16:26 +0100, Ben Hutchings wrote: > > > On Fri, 2010-03-26 at 10:51 +0100, Sven Joachim wrote: > >> Thanks for the explanation. Speaking of the firmware, is anyone working > >> on packaging it? Ubuntu has a package¹ in multiverse which works fine > >> for me and could be used as a base, although it should probably named > >> firmware-nouveau for consistency. > > [...] > > > > I'll have a look at that. I heard there were some concerns about > > licencing a while back, as they were apparently large blobs extracted > > from the Nvidia drivers and might be copyrightable. > > They are not that large compared to the whole Nvidia driver (biggest > file is 33K), but they might be copyrightable. The debian/copyright > file of the Ubuntu package says: > > These files are firmware-like programs for initialising GPU context-switching. > They were extracted from memory-mapped IO traces of the nvidia binary driver > initialising the hardware. They were not generated by reverse-engineering the > source code of the binary driver. > . > It is unclear to me whether these files are actually copyrightable. It seems > that these programs are likely to be generated by the driver at runtime rather > than being hand-written. The nouveau driver takes this approach for nv4x > cards. If they are copyrightable, they should fall under the nvidia binary > driver's licence, below. > > Followed by the text of the actual license. Since Nvidia does not > distribute the files themselves and their license only allows > redistribution of unmodified files, it seems that if the files are > copyrightable they are also undistributable, but I'm no legal expert. I think this is legally risky and ftpmaster will probably not allow it. > > Do you know what happened about that? > > The latest thing I could find is a thread on the ubuntu-x list in > February, starting at > https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-x/2010-February/000773.html. > I don't know if any progress has been made since then. > > An alternative to the nouveau-firmware package would be to backport > Marcin Kościelnicki's ctxprogs generator that is included in 2.6.34. > It generates the GPU initialization data on the fly, so no firmware is > needed. Right, I think we may have to do that. Ben. -- Ben Hutchings Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it makes it worse.
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