Nouveau Supporting HDMI 2.1 Won't Hopefully Be Too Challenging Thanks To NVIDIA Firmware

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Nouveau Supporting HDMI 2.1 Won't Hopefully Be Too Challenging Thanks To NVIDIA Firmware

While there is a lot of frustration from the news last week of the HDMI Forum rejecting AMD's open-source HDMI 2.1 driver support plans, the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver won't hopefully have too challenging of an experience in enabling HDMI 2.1 functionality since much of the display handling there is left up to NVIDIA's (closed-source) firmware binaries...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Firmware-Blobs-HDMI-2.1

[Brittle2]

can't they do the same with the Mesa drivers?, maybe not an AMD dev, but Valve or Red Hat?

[dragon321]

can't they do the same with the Mesa drivers?, maybe not an AMD dev, but Valve or Red Hat?

No, implementing HDMI is driver job and you can't just move it to the firmware if card wasn't designed with this in mind. It works for Nouveau because NVIDIA introduced GSP in their cards and GSP can handle many things that are handled by drivers in AMD cards, and because GSP firmware is closed source, NVIDIA could implement HDMI 2.1 there and Nouveau can simply get it with GSP firmware. AMD can't implement HDMI 2.1 in their open source drivers and they probably can't just move it to the firmware. Maybe in future cards AMD will go that route but existing cards are probably out of luck. Valve and Red Hat probably don't have access to the HDMI specification so they can't implement it as well.

[Anux]

Oh no, I fear a certain person will come here and sing it's praises for closed source.

[ahrs]

We'll see in the future if AMD decides to move their HDMI logic to the firmware in order to be able to support HDMI 2.1 within their open-source driver..

Is this something they can feasibly do? Would it require flashing a whole new BIOS to cards or simply updating the firmware would be enough?

Luckily I use Display Port and will make sure I avoid HDMI when I can in the future (I do have a secondary HDMI display but it's 60 Hz so no issues there) but there are still a lot of devices like TVs which do not have a Display Port connection.

[ssokolow]

Is this something they can feasibly do? Would it require flashing a whole new BIOS to cards or simply updating the firmware would be enough?

Luckily I use Display Port and will make sure I avoid HDMI when I can in the future (I do have a secondary HDMI display but it's 60 Hz so no issues there) but there are still a lot of devices like TVs which do not have a Display Port connection.

I think the intended reading is "We'll see if AMD amends the silicon of future generations to add the processing power needed to do this in firmware". Remember, nVidia's GSP is a RISC-V CPU on the card.

[vancha]

I guess it's kind of hoping for that last part now then? Where displayport kind of becomes the standard. I just wonder what that means for interoperability with tv's, that usually only have an hdmi port

[ahrs]

I think the intended reading is "We'll see if AMD amends the silicon of future generations to add the processing power needed to do this in firmware". Remember, nVidia's GSP is a RISC-V CPU on the card.

So there's no possible mechanism to enable this for existing cards even if they wanted to then. It's pretty sad if they'll have to go down the route of putting a whole extra RISC-V CPU on their cards just to circumvent the HDMI Forum restrictions and allow consumers to use their hardware to its full capacity. I imagine that'll increase the cost of the cards too.

[ssokolow]

So there's no possible mechanism to enable this for existing cards even if they wanted to then. It's pretty sad if they'll have to go down the route of putting a whole extra RISC-V CPU on their cards just to circumvent the HDMI Forum restrictions and allow consumers to use their hardware to its full capacity. I imagine that'll increase the cost of the cards too.

It's possible they could. I don't know how the graphics pipeline works in enough detail to say. What's certain is that it'd cost them a lot of patching and QA on already-developed products if they did go for it and it wouldn't help 99%+ of their customers (Windows, console vendors, etc.) who are already using drivers that are HDMI NDA-compliant.

[Gwen]

Oh no, I fear a certain person will come here and sing it's praises for closed source.

Did a little birdie tell you?