From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Martin Peres Subject: Re: NVIDIA Falcon Microprocessor Security Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2014 01:15:46 +0200 Message-ID: <5425F3A2.3050703@free.fr> References: <20140926171939.GE6384@parker.nvidia.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; Format="flowed" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20140926171939.GE6384-4K9zQNqW3/fFT5IIyIEb6QC/G2K4zDHf@public.gmane.org> List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: nouveau-bounces-PD4FTy7X32lNgt0PjOBp9y5qC8QIuHrW@public.gmane.org Sender: "Nouveau" To: Andy Ritger , nouveau-PD4FTy7X32lNgt0PjOBp9y5qC8QIuHrW@public.gmane.org List-Id: nouveau.vger.kernel.org Hi Andy, On 26/09/2014 19:19, Andy Ritger wrote: > Hi, all. > > Below is a link to a brief document describing some changes in NVIDIA > Falcon processors ("fuc", in Nouveau-speak, IIUC) We actually renamed most of our docs to falcon :) > that happened in > Maxwell: certain aspects of the chip will only be available to Falcon > firmware images signed by NVIDIA. So far, the set of restricted things > is pretty small, but I expect this list will slowly grow over future > hardware generations. > > ftp://download.nvidia.com/open-gpu-doc/Falcon-Security/1/Falcon-Security.html > > I suspect this will not be the most popular decision, but it is the > direction the hardware is taking. Thank you for the heads-up! We actually wondered yesterday about what kind of operations were forbidden without a signed falcon. > On a slightly different note, we'd like to work out the best way to > make NVIDIA firmware images separately (from the rest of the driver) > available and officially redistributable for use by Nouveau. At this > point, it is mostly just a release engineering question, but I don't think > we'll have a lot of influence over the content: the engineers working on > Falcon microcode assume it changes in lock-step with NVIDIA's nvidia.ko, > so there are no backwards compatibility guarantees. How painful has > the lack of backwards compatibility been for Nouveau thus far? > > If NVIDIA just released firmware binaries along side each NVIDIA GPU driver > release, would it be reasonable for Nouveau to pick and choose which > firmware you'd like promoted to, e.g., > > http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/tree/ > > ? > > Anyway, this might be a good topic to discuss at XDC. It looks I'll > see a lot of you then; I'm looking forward to it! Yeah, this really seems like a very good discussion to have at XDC. I'll find a room for us to sit and discuss the problem. Thanks again and see you soon! Martin