linuxaudio.org

On Thu, 2006-06-22 at 02:47 +0200, Thomas Ilnseher wrote:

quoted text
> 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