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they *what*? (double-checks the date to make sure it's not April)
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Congratulations to @nvidia for finally open sourcing their kernel drivers. Long time coming, but absolutely the right move. Looking forward to sending some PRs :).
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they... acknowledge Nouveau as existing and desirable? hell really did freeze over
In the meantime, published source code serves as a reference to help improve the Nouveau driver. Nouveau can leverage the same firmware used by the NVIDIA driver, exposing many GPU functionalities, such as clock management and thermal management, bringing new features to the in-tree Nouveau driver.

Stay tuned for more developments in future driver releases and collaboration on GitHub.
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It's not as new as it seems because their Tegra kernel drivers were always open source for Android. Pixel C uses Nouveau as the kernel driver because Google worked with NVIDIA to extend the in-tree kernel driver with Tegra support. The userspace library was still closed source.
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They never had any success in the smartphone market and gave up on the tablet market. Google seemed to be very interested in having a more competitive SoC market and a vendor willing to do away with closed source libraries. Nexus 9 / Pixel C didn't sell enough to prop that up.
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