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

John Bradford
2002-12-31T14:23:15Z

> > 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.

Sorry, I didn't really explain what I meant very well. I realise that
it's not just a case of getting the driver to compile on other
architectures, what I meant was that if the driver is open source then
anybody is free to work on the support for non-X86 boxes. If it's
closed source, then only the manufacturer can work on it.

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

That's interesting, I didn't know that. How complete is it? Does it
just emulate a subset of X86 instructions that are enough for 90% of
initialisation code?

John.