On Thu, 2006-06-22 at 02:47 +0200, Thomas Ilnseher wrote: > Lee Revell wrote: > > On Wed, 2006-06-21 at 12:44 -0500, Gian Paolo Mureddu wrote: > > > >> However for the video drivers, as was said in another post to this > >> thread by Rob, nVidia and ATi are not releasing specs for their > >> hardware for Open Source drivers due to incarnate battle over > >> features, price and performance... I would have to assume that an Open > >> Source driver initiative on at least the kernel end would be > >> tremendously helpful to prevent lockups and ease debugging, not to > >> mention that installing their binary X drivers would be much easier, > >> after all the kernel module pretty much is only a bridge between the X > >> driver and the hardware, the magic is done in the X driver, not the > >> kernel gateway (or am I terribly wrong here?) > >> > > > > Unfortunately you are wrong. The nvidia kernel module contains a full > > OpenGL implementation :-P > > > at least the file sizes imply that you are right. > > i can guess why they have put it in there ... > but this does change the light in which the driver shines ... They put it in there because on Windows, vendors are free to put any damn thing in a kernel driver (I've seen Windows drivers that contain a full AC3 decoder that uses floating point math), and their legal strategy to get around the GPL is to make the Linux nvidia driver a GPL wrapper around the same binary blob the Windows driver uses. This way it can't be considered a derivative work of the kernel and thus the GPL does not require them to make the source available. (Disclaimer: IANAL, this is all hearsay and certainly has not been tested in court) If you run strings on nvidia.o you can see HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE in there :-P Lee
