Comment Re:Not the same, but a subset (Score 1) 192
That is not how Nvidia's or ANY video card firmware works because they need to be active at the moment of power on, before there is even an OS loaded. VBIOS is stored on the card, not copied to VRAM.
What you say is absolutely true yet grossly misleading and I suspect you know it. Yes, if you boot a machine with no HDD, no OS, no drivers the computer will display something to say "Hey, I have no boot disk" which is obviously built in. To get 2D/3D/video acceleration though you typically need to load a firmware module first, then you can start programming it through the API. As I understand it based on reading about AMD's open drivers which still depend on closed source hardware their opinion it the firmware makes the hardware comply with their "assembler language" GPU API. It won't function without it and explaining the actual bits would mean explaining the hardware implementation which is a tightly guarded company secret. It should also be noted that the firmware doesn't run on the CPU, it runs internally on the GPU so it's a bit like demanding how a RAID card's chip is programmed, not the driver that runs on the CPU but the programming of auxiliary chips. The funny part is that nobody cares if you use an EEPROM to write the firmware blob to that the card will read from. But if you binary dump it directly, then RMS won't be happy. I don't see the big practical difference though.