[ploxiln]

https://lwn.net/Articles/953144/

> Recently, though, the company has rearchitected its products, adding a large RISC-V processor (the GPU system processor, or GSP) and moving much of the functionality once handled by drivers into the GSP firmware. The company allows that firmware to be used by Linux and shipped by distributors. This arrangement brings a number of advantages; for example, it is now possible for the kernel to do reclocking of NVIDIA GPUs, running them at full speed just like the proprietary drivers can. It is, he said, a big improvement over the Nouveau-only firmware that was provided previously.

> There are a number of disadvantages too, though. The firmware provides no stable ABI, and a lot of the calls it provides are not documented. The firmware files themselves are large, in the range of 20-30MB, and two of them are required for any given device. That significantly bloats a system's /boot directory and initramfs image (which must provide every version of the firmware that the kernel might need), and forces the Nouveau developers to be strict and careful about picking up firmware updates.

[noch]

>> I see no indications either that either nvidia nor any of the rest of the manufacturers has moved any respectable amount of functionality to the firmware.

Someone who believes this could easily prove that they are correct by "simply" taking their 4090 and documenting all its functionality, as was done with the [7900 xtx](https://github.com/geohot/7900xtx).

You can't say "I see no indications/evidence" unless you have proven that there is no evidence, no?

[paulmd]

so basically “if you really think there’s no proof of a positive claim, then you won’t mind conclusively proving the negation”?

no, that’s not how either logical propositions or burden of proof works

[exe34]

He has already told you how to prove it: enumerate the functionality of the driver - the GPU and the code are finite, bounded environments. You can absolutely prove that there is no tea in a cup, that there are no coins in a purse, that there is no cat in a box, etc.

[noch]

> no, that’s not how either logical propositions or burden of proof works

I think you're missing the point, perhaps intentionally to make a smart-sounding point?

We're programmers, working on _specific physical things_. If I claim that my CPU's branch predictor is not doing something, it is only prudent to find out what it is doing, and enumerate the finite set of what it contains.

Does that make sense? The goal is to figure out _how things actually work_ rather than making claims and arguing past each other until the end of time.

Perhaps you don't care about what the firmware blobs contain, and so you'd rather have an academic debate about logical propositions, but I care about the damn blobs, because it matters for my present and future work.

[cpgxiii]

These aren't necessarily conflicting assessments. The addition of the GSP to Turing and later GPUs does mean that some behavior can be moved on-device from the drivers. Device initialization and management is an important piece of behavior, certainly, but in the context of the all work done by the Nvidia driver (both kernel and user-space), it is a relatively tiny portion (e.g. compiling/optimizing shaders and kernels, video encode/decode, etc).