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
On Mon, Oct 31, 2016 at 1:34 AM, Ilia Mirkin imirkin@alum.mit.edu wrote:
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?
Certainly. Actually my first version of 8539b37acef7 did fall back to the original paths for loading firmware, but Ben suggested that we just replace the paths entirely, hence the version currently merged:
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2015-June/084914.html
Ben, do you agree with falling back to the old "nouveau/nvxx_fucxxxx" firmware names so people don't need to move their firmware files around?
On Mon, Oct 31, 2016 at 2:31 AM, Alexandre Courbot gnurou@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Oct 31, 2016 at 1:34 AM, Ilia Mirkin imirkin@alum.mit.edu wrote:
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?
Certainly. Actually my first version of 8539b37acef7 did fall back to the original paths for loading firmware, but Ben suggested that we just replace the paths entirely, hence the version currently merged:
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2015-June/084914.html
Ben, do you agree with falling back to the old "nouveau/nvxx_fucxxxx" firmware names so people don't need to move their firmware files around?
The theory was that the nouveau fw was going to be sufficient for pre-GM200 chips. Practice hasn't lived up to that - a ton of people with a GTX 660's have issues with the nouveau fw being unstable, whose issues are fixed by the extracted firmware from the blob.
-ilia
dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org
-
Alexandre Courbot -
Ilia Mirkin