Is closed source firmware holding back community's development?

[bridgman]

So far I've seen bridgman singing the praises of closed source firmware endless times, dismissing complaints like if there was nothing to gain from a different approach.

I would be surprised if you could find even a single example of that. I regard closed source firmware as a necessary evil at best. I have sometimes explained why it is necessary (primarily video content protection), but that's a long way from "singing its praises"... unless that expression has been redefined and given a completely different meaning from the one I am familiar with.

I'm not complaining because GCN 1.0 support is lagging behind, I can understand it. I'm complaining because AMD denies the benefits of open source firmware. Now that GCN 1.0 development is lagging because of proprietary firmware maybe more people will start to understand that "firmware doesn't matter" is just a child tale.

I probably don't have to explain that we can't put our content protection mechanisms at risk, or remind you how long the devs worked to come up with a scheme that would allow us to release UVD support for older hardware in the first place.

The CI generation was the first where we were able to get hardware changes through the product pipeline to make the HW more open source friendly... everything before was designed for closed source drivers only and it was just a combination of luck and perseverence that allowed us to support the older UVDs at all.

AFAIK it's not a matter of just releasing the required microcode, it has to be written first and I believe there were some technical obstacles there - I think we hit a size limit in a microcode store. I don't know how bad the required hacks would be to run on amdgpu with the microcode images we developed for radeon but it might be worth revisiting that.

[dungeon]

I'm not complaining because GCN 1.0 support is lagging behind, I can understand it. I'm complaining because AMD denies the benefits of open source firmware. Now that GCN 1.0 development is lagging because of proprietary firmware maybe more people will start to understand that "firmware doesn't matter" is just a child tale.

It matters of course, but there is another child tale which says how 'Gentoo users should always buy two same machines, one as build machine and another to be used'