I think that’s right, depending on your definition of “untainted”. My understanding is that no binary blob code will be executed in kernel space, but we will still need to load a signed binary firmware blob (provided by nVidea) into the GPU. The main job of the new driver will be to communicate with the firmware blob.
“we need a new kernel uAPI and the nouveau kernel needs quite a bit of work” I thought this implied that the NVK driver will use a reworked in tree nouveau driver to talk to nvidia hardware, is this not the case?
I’m really hoping this project will succeed, I would love to be able to use an untainted Linux kernel on my laptop.
I think that’s right, depending on your definition of “untainted”. My understanding is that no binary blob code will be executed in kernel space, but we will still need to load a signed binary firmware blob (provided by nVidea) into the GPU. The main job of the new driver will be to communicate with the firmware blob.
Still needing a mystery signed firmware blob is certainly not ideal, but having a mainline in kernel driver does seem like a significant improvement.
I don’t think nvk will help you there. Their mesa driver runs on the userland, not in the kernel. The tainting happens in the kernel.
“we need a new kernel uAPI and the nouveau kernel needs quite a bit of work” I thought this implied that the NVK driver will use a reworked in tree nouveau driver to talk to nvidia hardware, is this not the case?
I see what you mean, sorry, you are correct here!