A Game Developer's Perspective On Linux Driver Quality

[b15hop]

It's more the comments than the code...

//
// help me I'm chained to the desk they won't let me leave or even see the sky my family
// thinks im dead and I haven't been able to stand up for days worst of all they make
// me follow these stupid coding standards...
//

I'm crying in laughter. :'''D

Come to think of it he could have at least done this:

/*
  help me I'm chained to the desk they won't let me leave or even see the sky my family
  thinks im dead and I haven't been able to stand up for days worst of all they make
  me follow these stupid coding standards...
*/

Or even

/*
 * Help me I'm chained to the desk they won't let me leave or even see the sky my family
 * thinks im dead and I haven't been able to stand up for days worst of all they make
 * me follow these stupid coding standards...
 */

[zanny]

They don't let you use multi line comments? The monsters.

[bridgman]

It's more the comments than the code...

//
// help me I'm chained to the desk they won't let me leave or even see the sky my family
// thinks im dead and I haven't been able to stand up for days worst of all they make
// me follow these stupid coding standards...
//

[Awesomeness]

This myth has already been debunked. There is no IP that keeps AMD from open sourcing their drivers. It's their "OpenGL secret sacue" that they don't want others to see. AMD said it themselves.

I bet the sauce is just horrible code that the general public should not see.

[Awesomeness]

Any existing Non Linux drivers out there using Gallium?
(*BSD was porting some, are those working?)

AFAIK Haiku.

[Awesomeness]

Wouldn't those drivers have to be signed my Microsoft though? I wonder what their stance on freely licensed kernel drivers are. (no sarcasm)

The whole Mesa stack is under a BSD license. Even if MS is against open drivers for Windows, the Windows port could be closed source.

[bridgman]

Huh... you're right. The Phoronix article says "Linux Driver Quality" but the blog is about Windows and Linux. Good catch.

[robclark]

My guess was that C#1 was Intel open source for Intel's own gfx hardware, and C#2 was the embedded driver for PowerVR hardware.

This assumes the author was only discussing Linux drivers, which I *think* is the case but not 100% sure.

I think he was talking about intel windows driver (which maybe shares a codebase w/ osx driver??).. pvr would be 'Vendor D'.. and hopefully game dev's have the good sense to run away from that one :-P

[bridgman]

"Low priority" being the key, rather than "legal department". They just don't care as much about it, not that there are some outstanding legal problems with it.

Interesting because "low priority" is the one thing I don't think I said, other than in the context of having just pushed a lot of new IP out and needing to give the impacted teams time to work on other stuff as well.

And I definitely don't remember saying anything about not caring as much

Also, for the lebenty-million-six-hundred-and-(counts on fingers)sixth time, it's a lot more than legal review.

re: "if the problem is OpenGL secrets why is that holding up other things ?", I don't think I understand the logic behind the question.

The statement was that the main obstacle to opening up Catalyst OpenGL was OpenGL secrets, while (surprisingly enough) the main obstacle to opening up other areas is secrets in *those* areas. There's a beautiful consistency to it all if you step back a bit.

[GreatEmerald]

According to bridgman, the code for that is going around between developers and the legal department, but on a low priority. If the reason the Catalyst driver will not be open sourced is secret OpenGL ingredients, why don't we have the non-OpenGL parts already? The truth is, no one works on this and we will never see UVD on those chips.

"Low priority" being the key, rather than "legal department". They just don't care as much about it, not that there are some outstanding legal problems with it.