On Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:35:08 -0500 Will Dyson <will.dy...@gmail.com> wrote:
> This seems similar to the unfortunate situation with the b43 > wireless card firmware. Broadcom refuses to provide the firmware > under a redistributable license (or even as files separate from > their proprietary drivers). This did not stop b43 from being > included in Linux. Distributions have dealt with it by providing > a script that downloads the proprietary driver and extracts the > firmware from it to files in /lib/firmware. > > Do you think that a similar solution for nouveau would be legally > problematic? Or is the issue technical, since you mention that the > ctxprogs were obtained by mmiotrace, instead of a more > straightforward extraction from the binary driver blobs? It is definitely a lot harder than a script that just downloads something. It would have to: - download the proprietary driver - install it and load it into the kernel - activate mmiotrace (if it even is compiled in) - reconfigure and start X and quit - analyse the mmiotrace log to extract the ctxprog and ctxvals - undo all the proprietary setup I cannot comment on the legal side, but the practise sounds too cumbersome. Thanks. -- Pekka Paalanen http://www.iki.fi/pq/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Return on Information: Google Enterprise Search pays you back Get the facts. http://p.sf.net/sfu/google-dev2dev -- _______________________________________________ Dri-devel mailing list Dri-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dri-devel
