NVIDIA and nouveau

Exactly this. BTW this was discussed a lot in the Q&A session at the end of the presentation, the URL is above.

IMHO the key idea is to stop considering the GPU (and some others) as some "ancillary" device that should be fully initialized as early and quickly as possible. The CPU and GPU should instead be treated more like _peers_ in the "Distributed System on Chip", trying to boot at the same time with as few as possible early dependencies between each other.

There is clearly another, "full-blown" operating system in those 40 Megabytes; some Linux products are smaller than that!

So the GPU should have its own, basic "bootloader" that makes the screen just _usable_; the equivalent of UEFI on the main CPU. In fact you bet NVidia engineers have stuff like this internally _already_ because they need "bootloader" and minimal systems like this when they screw up the big image and it stops booting - exactly like when you fall back to UEFI and GRUB when you screw up the OS of the main CPU.

"NVidia must release option ROMs" was mentioned in the Q&A session.