AMD's Raven Ridge Botchy Linux Support Appears Worse With Some Motherboards/BIOS

[bridgman]

Of course. I don't want to downplay AMD in any way. But realistically a lot of AMD's code looks too "mechanical", too abstracted to have been written by a human. (People tend to like elegance, and tend to strive for it. But very little of AMD's code is elegant. Much of it has multiple layers of abstraction that are totally unnecessary that no human would've written.)

As agd5f asked, can you give some examples ?

[pal666]

This article right here explains why Linux, despite being around over 2 decades, can't even manage to get more than 1 percent of the desktop.

and at the same time this article explains why linux managed to get more than 85% of smartphones, which are bigger market than desktops, right? reiterate main points please.

With Linux you can't do that, you need to wait for the support to be built into the kernel, which means that you can't run the latest hardware from day one.

bullshit. on linux you can boot installer with old kernel and pick up updates automatically during install. updates have to contain hardware support, just like in windows world vendor website has to contain hardware support. some hardware is not ready on release day, but you've got reason backwards. desktop linux has tiny marketshare, which means it pays for tiny share of driver developers at hw vendor, so they could use more time

Linux and Unix needs to rethink the driver model that's used, one should be able to install a driver for a device without needing to rebuild the kernel or having to wait for the kernel maintainers to decide to include support for a given device.

linux has best driver model of all operating systems and best hardware support of all operating systems. and btw you don't have to rebuild kernel or having to wait for kernel maintaners (how do you think nvidia gets its blob to users????)

Until then Linux is destined to be a footnote in the history of computing.

linux is by far the most used operating system in the world. more than billion of linux smartphones is sold each year. until you stop living in alternative reality you are destined to post bullshit

[duby229]

As agd5f asked, can you give some examples ?

DC for example. It's been overhauled multiple times now, and it looks much better now. But at first much of it was obviously generated somehow.

[pal666]

What I meant was that I think a lot of AMD code itself was generated with some sort of C generator.

you are replying to exact list of those "a lot" of amd generated code without realizing it

[bridgman]

DC for example. It's been overhauled multiple times now, and it looks much better now. But at first much of it was obviously generated somehow.

Actually no - the abstraction you are complaining about there was deliberate in order to let the same code run cleanly across a broad range of OSes and platforms. We had to remove some of that abstraction and replace it with Linux-specific logic, making the code more expensive to maintain and more likely to have bugs (but more readable and better integrated with Linux-specific subsystem code), in order to have it accepted upstream.

There is some auto-generated code as agd5f already said (the bandwidth calculation logic) but if anything that is under-abstracted not over-abstracted.

[agd5f]

All the people testing it and saying HDMI 2.0 works are on Windows, so I guess the Windows driver is just ignoring the connector table.

Or the hw is validated for HDMI 2.0.

[duby229]

Actually no - the abstraction you are complaining about there was deliberate in order to let the same code run across a broad range of OSes and platforms. There is some auto-generated code as agd5f already said (the bandwidth calculation logic) but if anything that is under-abstracted not over-abstracted.

It was barely commented and was highly mechanical. I don't buy that.

[pal666]

Look at AMD's code and then you tell me if you think a human would've done that....

all amd code i've seen was written by people

[agd5f]

do you advertise linux reference platforms so people could direct their purchases?

The reference platforms are generally not sold directly. We use them for internal validation and as reference platforms for OEMs and partners.

[pal666]

It was barely commented and was highly mechanical.

lol. you are not a developer, are you?