Re: Why is Nvidia given GPL'd code to use in closed source drivers?

Jochen Friedrich
2002-12-31T14:14:10Z

Hi John,

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

--jochen