Valve Hires X11 Veteran Keith Packard To Work On The Linux Display Stack

[pal666]

Technically, could the problem of shader compilation should be solved with vulkan's spirv? Maybe games should use spirv with OpenGL?

spirv has nothing to do with shader compilation. shader compilation can be solved only by (improving)shader compiler

[GreatEmerald]

Oh hey, it's Apollo Jus-- I mean, Keith Packard again! Is he still working on Xorg itself?

[Masush5]

Technically, could the problem of shader compilation should be solved with vulkan's spirv? Maybe games should use spirv with OpenGL?

spirv shaders still need to be compiled to hardware specific code. It might be somewhat faster because parsing spiv is faster than parsing glsl but afaik most of the time in the compiler pipeline for radeonsi is spent in later stages.

[DMJC]

I met Keith in 2004 at Linux.conf Au. Really nice guy, love his work.

[starshipeleven]

So I'm guessing that The Machine went the way of Taligent, Copland and Pink.

(For anyone under 30: that's not the name of a law firm.)

How totally unexpected, HP's ability to innovate died decades ago.

[tg--]

Perhaps someone should bother to read what Keith himself writes before falling into wild speculation and starting false rumours.
Keith is still working at HPE's "The Machine" project; he is not employed by Valve, but doing consulting there in his spare time.

https://keithp.com/blog/

[humbug]

Valve is really smart improving Linux performance for games.
There are and will be many more people looking for an alternative for their Windows 8 Metro crap and Windows 10 spyware crap when they get tired of things shoved down their throat by Microsoft.
It's really nice to see that Linux will be a viable alternative for me too when I will be finally leaving Windows 7.
Good job Valve!
And thank you very much!

What Valve has done and is doing is making Linux a good alternative to windows as a operating system to play PC games. Since Valve got involved The pace of progress is much faster and they have really pushed things on multiple fronts like drivers, engines, tools, APIs not only by working on stuff themselves but also by canvassing other companies behind the scenes. Overall Linux gaming is headed in a good direction.

However as far as attracting a general more widespread audience to Linux it is upto canonical, Linux mint, debian, fedora etc to push things in a direction somehow that everyday PC users want to switch to their OS. Yes they are benefiting from Valve's work in the gaming ecosystem but it seems there are other non-gaming concerns for them to tackle and attract people to Linux.

[labyrinth153]

God help us if it is up to Canonical. They already dropped the ball hard trying to be the "pretend open source" Apple.