Nvidia Linux drivers (partially) open-sourced, MIT license

So, it kinda looks like Nvidia is actually changing to AMD’s model of driver development. (AMD calls this AtomBIOS).

The problem is all the graphic memory management code that can’t possibly exist in the card’s onboard blob… This is one of the big reasons that we have “supported” Radeon HD cards for a decade now with just basic mode setting, nobody has fully picked up OpenGL 3D rendering because “it’s pretty difficult”.

The best future we have for 3d rendering is adopting a DRM / DRI compatibility layer (like we do for FreeBSD’s network drivers or will do with OpenBSD’s network drivers). Then we can simply leverage the Linux drivers with some wrappers that Mesa can plug into.

tldr; we historically haven’t had the man (or lady) power to write multiple native GPU drivers that can do 3d rendering, while keeping up with the continuous generational GPU jumps.

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Wouldn’t it be more interesting to write a wrapper for Windows Driver Foundation and be able to use all available Windows drivers? That would solve the problem of not having drivers.
Now, there’s a wrapper for FreeBSD and for OpenBSD and networking only.

…i just thinking that would be super hard… if not… linux folk have done that instead struggling writing drivers…

AtomBIOS and GSP are quite different: AtomBIOS is executed by OS driver opcode interpreter and GSP firmware is executed in dedicated RISC-V microcontroller located at graphics card. GSP seems more actively used during GPU operation.

Hardware OpenGL rendering is working for me by using Zink over RADV Vulkan driver and my RadeonGfx GPU control driver running in userland. Currently only Southern Islands Radeon GPUs are supported. I hope I manage to run GFX 8 (Polaris) series in next months.

One of significant problems is lack of proper graphics architecture on Haiku, for example accelerant still do not supports multiple monitors, there are no proper suppport of framebuffer flipping.

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It may be easier to run Linux or FreeBSD userland Nvidia drivers. Actually this is already implemented to run Linux userland drivers on FreeBSD: GitHub - shkhln/libc6-shim: Cheap glibc knockoff.

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Create a branch and support the missing features, it can always be merged post r1

This is great news…

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