Re: Packagaing nouveau firmware
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.
> 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.
Sven
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