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Comment by meego | Hacker News Reader

Can the nouveau project make use of this without ending in legal hot water?

The nouveau project need to guarantee that anyone working on the relevant new features to hasn't had access to the Nvidia leak, to make sure the resulting implementation is a clean-room one [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

No, and I'm not sure why the article suggests that. Under US copyright law it's best to avoid this like the plague and continue attempting a clean-room implementation.

Not a chance. Think it was either the reactos or wine project used to have processes in place to check people weren't submitting codes from the win2k leaks either.

The roadblock for nouveau is that the chipset won't allow the clocks to be set to performant frequencies unless the NVIDIA-signed binary firmware blob is uploaded.

Which still can be used, no? All we need is to know the API to the firmware blob, which this leak probably shows nicely

Replacing the firmware blob too is kinda the point of the driver. Now, if also the signing key were in the dump, people could finally sign their own firmware blobs. It's probably not legal to facilitate that in any way, but how can it be proven if you don't distribute any homegrown blobs?

Edit: even if the Nvidia blob were used, it would (i) be a big departure from Mesa architecture and infrastructure and (ii) it would be illegal to distribute it. Nvidia could also introduce an arbitrary amount of protocol madness to make accessing the firmware blob as difficult as possible.

> it would be illegal to distribute it

Fortunately Nvidia provides all their drivers free of charge on their website, so it shouldn't be hard to download and extract it at install time?

The other points still stand. And it's possible there is also a legal reason that prohibits taking apart the driver. In any case, it would defeat the purpose of having an open source driver.

> In any case, it would defeat the purpose of having an open source driver.

Not really. Having a closed-source on-card firmware blob but linking it with an open source kernel-side driver would have so many benefits, first of all not needing to depend on NVIDIA to keep up with upstream changes and stuff breaking at every kernel, xorg or whatever upgrade.

I have to admit I don't understand the relationships between SecureBoot, the Power Management Firmware and the kernel well enough to exactly say why it doesn't work.

Probably makes it harder for them, in the future any time Nvidia claims they took something from the leak they potentially have to prove in court that they didn't.

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