Here is a relevant quote from Ilia Mirkin, one of the developers of Nouveau:

Reclocking must be done in firmware. NVIDIA now requires signed firmware to access a lot of useful functionality. They will never release the firmware in a nice redistributable manner, so the avenues for implementing it become much harder:

(a) Figure out a way to extract the firmware from their released drivers (harder than it sounds) and how to operate it to do the things we need
(b) Find a bug in their firmware to use to load our own code into the secure environment (any such exploit would be patched, but once we have a version of the firmware that's exploitable with signatures, we can just keep loading it instead of whatever's the latest)

Of course all that gets us is ... firmware which can toggle stuff GPU-side. Then we have to develop the scripts to actually perform the reclocking to pass on to the firmware. This is the hard part -- due to the wide variety of hardware, ram chips, etc there can be a lot of variation in those scripts. A single developer might only have 1% of the boards out there, but by fuzzing the vbios and seeing how the blob driver reacts, we can get much more significant coverage.

As part of the signed-everything logic, the blob driver now also verifies that the VBIOS hasn't been tampered with, which means that developing reclocking scripts will require different techniques.

Moral of the story... just get an Intel or AMD board and move on with life. NVIDIA has no interest in supporting open-source, and so if you want to support open-source, pick a company that aligns with this.

Yes, I call that jerks, because it's totally in their ability to do it. They don't want to, since they want to control the market by using their driver. Functional nouveau will totally bust that ability, since it will let users themselves decide how to use their hardware.

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Quoting: jensYou called their management people jerks, so I guess you ever talked to one of them and can justify your statement?

I did. Because they are not upstreaming their kernel driver and preventing nouveau from doing it for them efficiently.

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Quoting: jensSo you had an interview with somebody from the Nvidia management?

It's not developers' decision, or you expected otherwise for some reason? Actual Nvidia Linux developers said as much, that it's their management that has to do something for better collaboration.

And it is jerk behavior from that management, either we move on or it, we should call it what it is.

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Quoting: tpauI still wonder why they don't go the AMD way and share development of the base driver with the opensource community

Because it's Nvidia. Their managements are jerks and don't get what open source collaboration is. Otherwise they would have opened their kernel driver already.

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Quoting: rkfgI'm sad anyway every time an abstraction leaks, in this case the driver/Vulkan abstraction. If you thinkg about it, most of the bad things in our world happen due to some interface not being sufficiently abstract from the implementation.

Vulkan doesn't enforce memory allocation approach for example. And that can have a huge impact on performance. So I wouldn't say it's leaking driver abstraction.

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I'm very curious what they mean by the "industry interest", especially since they're not giving out real details on that.

I suspect something like this: https://gpuopen.com/presentation-porting-engine-to-vulkan-dx12/ [External Link]

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I don't really care about "mostly negative reviews" metric. But some examples of what is actually wrong with it could be useful :) Good to know they improved saves mechanics. I'm a backer, so still waiting for GOG release anyway.

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It still missing the promised GOG release.

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Yep, that's good now! Notable that Vega usage started growing around the same time prices on cards started normalizing, when cryptocurrency boom was over.

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Quoting: marcusProbably nothing. In the end it may not be worth it for them with it working quite well in Proton.

It may be working well in Wine / Proton without their involvement, but it's a reputation issue. They promised Linux release and blew it. It wasn't exactly their fault, since Cry Engine version they used had low quality Linux support, but now they have a relatively easy way to actually keep their promise, utilizing the very fact that it's working well in Wine.

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