AMD Seeking Comments On DC/DAL Code, Wants To Land It Soon For Future GPU Support

[bridgman]

Couldn't AMD do something liek this? :

1. Kernel with bare minimum HAL code
2. Real HAL code independent from kernel and drivers
3. Drivers

Then they just package their HAL code with the drivers.
Or is it not that simple?

Not that simple... the HAL itself is the sore point, not the 100,000 (actually more like 60,000) lines of code.

[GreatEmerald]

Hm, yea, that's a tough one. I can see how desperate the situation is getting...

I also thought that maybe it would be best if AMD could put the minimum code in the kernel to make the hardware work, and then have the rest (almost all?) of DAL in a separate tree for now. But then if making the minimum code would require a rewrite of proportions that equals the removal of the DAL layer, then of course that is not feasible. And I guess it's a bit of a question whether it's better to have support in upstream kernel but with freezes and bad power management, or stable support outside upstream...

It also makes me wonder just how terrible NVIDIA's blob code must be in comparison. The AMD code was meant to be open-sourced, after all... And, of course, since nobody can see the code, everyone's just fine with letting NVIDIA get away with it.

[indepe]

Couldn't AMD do something liek this? :

1. Kernel with bare minimum HAL code
2. Real HAL code independent from kernel and drivers
3. Drivers

Then they just package their HAL code with the drivers.
Or is it not that simple?

I guess, in general terms, one of the issues is that code which has a focus on "HAL" tries to hide the platform differences, without sufficiently addressing a platform's unique abilities.