OT: nvidia drivers ppc, ppc64

Mike A. Harris mharris at www.linux.org.uk
Fri May 6 05:17:22 UTC 2005


nodata wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-05-02 at 15:17 -0400, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> [snip]
> 
>>you're thanking me.  ;o)  The "nv" driver is source code provided
>>by Nvidia which is obfuscated and generally only hackable by Nvidia,
>>so it's more or less "as is" too.  I can't take any credit for it
> 
> 
> So it's not open source then :/

The source is MIT/X11 licensed, and you can do whatever you want
with it more or less under the MIT license terms.  Since the hardware
is not documented publically at all, and the source code avoids
documenting registers symbolically, etc. reading the nv driver source
generally wont get you any closer to understanding how the hardware
works.

If you take a pedantic view of what "open source" means, then the
'nv' driver is not "open source" because it is not in the "preferred
form", which would be fully symbolic naming of registers, et al.

So the nv driver is more or less "you can compile this cryptic
nonsense and use it perhaps."

;o)




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