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Date: Thu, 10 Dec 2009 15:35:08 -0500
Message-ID: <8e6f94720912101235l30d05c03m54b769d9fd6ac35d@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [git pull] drm
From: Will Dyson <will.dyson@gmail.com>
To: Pekka Paalanen <pq@iki.fi>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
       Dave Airlie <airlied@linux.ie>, Xavier Bestel <xavier.bestel@free.fr>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, dri-devel@lists.sf.net
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On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 2:49 PM, Pekka Paalanen <pq@iki.fi> wrote:

> The big question is what we call ctxprogs: binary blobs that are
> clearly executable, running somewhere in the GPU. No-one seems
> to know, if those are copyrightable, or if they can be redistributed.
> In their current form, they have been recorded from the nvidia
> proprietary driver using mmiotrace, and copied verbatim for each
> card type.
>
> Would you be willing to pull that kind of stuff into Linux?
>
> I would not even dare sending them to the Linux firmware
> repository, since they have some license requirements, too.

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?

-- 
Will Dyson
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