Nvidia source code leaked
Some of the Nvidia source code and chip designs have been leaked on the Internet. The first leak includes the source code for “nvn” which is the custom Nvidia driver used on the Nintendo switch, and also “nvn2” which is probably for the next Nintendo console, I can guarantee you that emulator developers will be making extensive use of this. Even though it is not ethical or legal. Now the Nouveau devs are gonna have to work extra hard and walk on eggshells indefinitely to avoid being sued. The code they use will be inspected to see if it contains any stolen code. This is not good for Linux users. If this does leak the source code for the Linux drivers, this would enable an open-source driver for Linux, but no one would be able to use it without getting sued, this is a fact. You can not use stolen code and submit it to the Linux kernel, it will not happen at all. This leak includes chip design files, this would enable reverse engineering of the Nvidia hardware and then the aforementioned open-source drivers would appear. But this would be discommodious to the whole philosophy of the free and open Linux kernel.
I wonder if the NVidia hackers got the firmware signing keys too. That would enable a hardware manufacturer to burn them to silicon and make a working signed clone of the hardware. History lesson – IBM publish the complete source code to the IBM PC’s BIOS. That way they could sue anyone who read it and then wrote a clone of the BIOS. So a group of programmers read the code, then documented each call, the params, the side effects, and the return values. Then another group of programmers took that documentation and wrote a clone of the BIOS. This new codebase was sold to a company called Compaq. You might have heard of them. More recent history – the SCO vs IBM case and the Oracle vs Google case both hinge on claims that people read code owned by one party and rewrote it for another party. The SCO case has been going on for 19 years, to the point that SCO currently only exists as a front for various law firms to continue the litigation. How long do you think Nvidia vs gFab9000 case would last? Answer: if gFab9000 took the .v and .vx files and burned them to silicon it would be very short.
If gFab9000 read the .v and .vx files, went “hey, that’s smart” then wrote their implementation it would take at least 10 years. And if gFab9000 was jiGongchang9000 nVidia would be in an embarrassing place. With China making copies of the Nvidia hardware, assuming they have a chip fabrication plant that can make chips to match an Nvidia 3090. ASIC failures are more common than you might think, there are an infinite amount of things that can go wrong inside modern GPUs, shorted/unresponsive transistors (any of the ~8billion), traces, vias and interconnects going bad, zapped input or output controllers (HDMI, DP, PCIe, DDR, etc…), overvolt faults(dead transistors, damaged wires). it’s hard to wrap your head around how complex these microchips are, if the veralog files come out, I hope someone “builds” the VLSI masks, THAT would be a sight to behold! to just be able to zoom in on the ‘die’ and see every single transistor, with one of those the map distance indicators, layer enable/disable etc… and all in the browser or something like that, but it would be quite illegal to do that of course.