[Ardour-Users] Can anyone help with a Linux problem ?

[Ralf Mardorf]

Mark Knecht wrote:
> On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 1:31 PM, Rob Quin <robquin at uklinux.net> wrote:
>   
>> On Thursday 28 May 2009 18:36, Mark Knecht wrote:
>>     
>>>>> I'm sure you probably know this but the closed-source driver cannot be
>>>>> shown to be rt-kernel safe
>>>>>           
>>>> Some people reported that and others reported it's fine.
>>>>         
>>> How does anyone other than NVidia be able to report it's rt-safe? Only
>>> NVidia can see the code.
>>>       
>>
>> I don't have any useful suggestions on the topic of this thread but I would
>> like to try and prevent this missinformation from spreading. This is the real
>> situation.
>>
>> The Nvidia code is copyrighted to Nvidia and not open source.
>> However the source is published by Nvidia and widely available so anyone can
>> inspect it,
>>     
>
> Interesting, and if true then that's great.
>
> My understanding is a bit different, but I'm open to be educated.
>
> First, there are two portions to the nvidia driver:
>
> a) A portion distributed as source. This portion is certainly human
> readable and it's function is to interface a lower level portion with
> your kernel. This portion can be inspected for rt safeness.
>
> b) A second portion that is distributed in binary. This portion does
> all the low-level, CPU/GPU intensive work. My understanding is that
> this is where the nvidia intellectual property is and they keep that
> private and, TTBOMK, cannot be inspected.
>
> To the best of my knowledge the second portion hasn't ever been
> distributed in source. It's presumably not even completely C code.
>
> But again, if I'm wrong about that then I'd be very interested in
> getting the story right. I'm not a coder and wouldn't have had any
> reason to go any further, but that's the story I've been told over the
> years.
>
> Cheers,
> Mark

http://packages.debian.org/de/etch/nvidia-kernel-source  ***???***

There are different informations on German, most say the proprietary is 
closed source.