Hi Alex,
As you're well-aware, your commit 8539b37acef73949861a16808b60cb8b5b9b3bab (drm/nouveau/gr: use NVIDIA-provided external firmwares) broke tons of existing setups for people who were using extracted firmware files (stored in the "nouveau" firmware directory) as a result of nouveau's ctxsw fw being ... lacking. This is especially common on GK106's for some reason.
The arguments for doing this at the time was that (a) all the bugs in nouveau's fw have been fixed and thus those people don't need to be using those extracted firmware files and (b) NVIDIA was going to release firmware and so things would Just Work (tm) since the new files would be at the new locations.
Neither of these have come to fruition. Plenty of people still have GK106's that don't work well with nouveau's fw. NVIDIA has shown no interest in releasing firmware in a redistributable fashion.
Can you please create a patch to fix this up so that it still tries to load files from the previous location with the previous names so that people's previously-working setups can keep on working?
Thanks,
-ilia