Vega Support Called For Pulling Into Linux 4.12, Without DC Support

[L_A_G]

Dave calls the final shot here - but he's not making the decisions alone - not in a true open source environment. If he were to loose the trust of Intel and AMD to act as the DRM maintainer and both parties presented an acceptable new candidate to the community he would likely be replaced. But as long as he's getting flak from Linus for being not-strict-enough and flak from the vendors for being too-strict I don't see that happen any time soon ;-)

In courts cases judges generally exclude themselves when they're personally affected by or involved in what's being decided over even when there's multiple judges on the case. Because of that I really don't buy the argument that his bias isn't worth taking into account when he's not completely alone in making the decision. Specially when he's the ultimate authority in what's pushed to Linus.

As for the talk about Linus' trust, why did he push tinyDRM code that didn't even compile and had only been committed the day before he passed it on to Linus? Even after Linus fixed a few things it would compile, but throw up some nasty compiler warnings, meaning that it wasn't just a typo someplace, but instead overall low quality code. I have to admit that I haven't had a look at the code base myself, but judging by Linus going on his legendary rants and what he said in it, the code must have been a mess. If David was going to be strict with the quality of code, shouldn't he be strict with all of the code he pushes to Linus?

That's exactly one of the core points of open source: Do it right for most/all use cases, not just yours. If you are the first, it may be easy to please all stake holders, if you are late, you have to play by the rules and code that's already there. Another point: Do you think AMD would have an open source OpenGL 4.5 driver without the huge amount of work that Intel put into OpenGL? From my point of view, the answer is a very clear "No". So who profits from this stuff, if AMD has to do things that benefit Intel and Intel has to do things that benefit AMD? It's *US*, the users any thus indirectly the companies that provide the hardware that satisfies the user's open source requirements. There is a reason why Nvidia provided open source drivers for Tegra: Because their circumventing the kernel's GPL requirement on the Linux desktop/server market does not work at all for the Linux embedded market - imagine going through the same steps before getting your in-car-entertainment system to work :-)

The fact that Intel has contributed a whole lot of labor to improving Mesa doesn't mean that AMD actually has to contribute anything in return. Open source, outside of the Stallman style way of thinking of it at least, really doesn't come with the obligation to contribute back. Just look at how Sony and now Nintendo are using very large swaths of the BSD code (both code under BSD-style licenses and various BSD distributions) in their projects without really contributing anything of value back to the code base or the people maintaining it.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the idea of co-operation inherent in open source, but I'm looking at this from a pure business perspective as AMD is a business whose main goal is to make money for their stockholders. They're not a university or other semi-nonprofit organization. My personal attitude to open source is rather similar to Linus. I'd prefer open source, but how well the software works and it's features do actually trump this. I also guess the fact that I used to almost exclusively use OSX and I still use binary blob Nvidia drivers shows in my general attitude to open source.

Last but not least, from my superficial understanding cleaning up DC (nee DAL) does not really benefit Intel or Nvidia but instead requires AMD to use/adapt existing infrastructure where it exists instead of rolling their own and replace the abstraction layer design as abstraction layers are frowned upon by the kernel community.

I'm pretty sure that cleaning up a code base and adapting it to use the same infrastructure as other vendors makes it easier to re-use for their hardware. As for using their own abstraction layers, isn't that what their #1 competitor, Nvidia, has been doing for a while as part of their own drivers? I have to admit I'm not intimately familiar with the internal workings of their drivers, but to my knowledge they do have a lot of proprietary abstraction layers and other things going on inside of their blob that are frowned upon by the wider graphics driver community.

So in short: It's great that companies like AMD are committing lots and lots of work and code to open source, but while I applaud them for doing it, I definitely don't take it for granted or act like I do.

[M@yeulC]

i bet you have no idea what those words mean

You are free to think whatever you want

[chithanh]

In courts cases judges generally exclude themselves when they're personally affected by or involved in what's being decided over even when there's multiple judges on the case. Because of that I really don't buy the argument that his bias isn't worth taking into account when he's not completely alone in making the decision.

My brother-in-law is attorney, and he says that for instance in tenancy cases, it matters a lot whether the judges themselves are landladies/landlords or tenants.

Same I believe is that it matters whether a subsystem maintainer is employed by a Linux distributor, or a software or a hardware company.