From: John Bradford <john@grabjohn.com>
Message-Id: <200212311431.gBVEVLVB001666@darkstar.example.net>
Subject: Re: Why is Nvidia given GPL'd code to use in closed source drivers?
To: jochen@scram.de (Jochen Friedrich)
Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2002 14:31:21 +0000 (GMT)
Cc: xavier.bestel@free.fr, andrew@walrond.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.4.44.0212311518570.9962-100000@www2.scram.de> from "Jochen Friedrich" at Dec 31, 2002 03:22:28 PM
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> > Are drivers for Alpha, Sparc, or anything else with a pci slot apart
> > from an X86 machine available?
> 
> Unfortunately, that wouldn't be enought. There are lots of PCI graphics
> cards available, which still only work in an X86 (and in most cases Alpha)
> machines, although there is an open source driver. The reason is that they
> need the initialisation code in their PCI BIOS, which is X86, binary
> code.

Sorry, I didn't really explain what I meant very well.  I realise that
it's not just a case of getting the driver to compile on other
architectures, what I meant was that if the driver is open source then
anybody is free to work on the support for non-X86 boxes.  If it's
closed source, then only the manufacturer can work on it.

> Alpha works around this by using an X86 emulator in their PAL code.

That's interesting, I didn't know that.  How complete is it?  Does it
just emulate a subset of X86 instructions that are enough for 90% of
initialisation code?

John.
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