9 Year Old Mesa Bug Fixed, Addresses Stability With RadeonSI Gallium3D

[Amarildo]

Dozens of developer-years of driver effort plus equivalent amount or more in the OS.

Correct. AMD does have a very large team working on the Windows driver. On the OpenSource stack, however, I believe it's between 6 and 9 people, correct me if I'm wrong.

Anyways, a very good catch by Marek. Thanks to everyone involved in getting this terrible bug fixed.

[microcode]

Dozens of developer-years of driver effort plus equivalent amount or more in the OS.

I'm going to guess that the kiddos on Phoronix forum don't know about WDDM(among other things, to make indirect rendering possible for Longhorn Aero!), and why it made Vista suck for years, and made graphics not insane on Windows 7. They surely don't know how many millions of dollars were spent paying very smart people to scratch their heads about it for years of their life. ;- )

[microcode]

Correct. AMD does have a very large team working on the Windows driver. On the OpenSource stack, however, I believe it's between 6 and 9 people, correct me if I'm wrong.

Anyways, a very good catch by Marek. Thanks to everyone involved in getting this terrible bug fixed.

He's referring to what it took to make it so that the Windows NT kernel was (more) isolated from serious failures in drivers, especially display drivers. Windows NT runs display drivers as isolated processes, Linux has no such thing; and even if Linux had memory-isolated drivers, it would still take many developer-years of effort to develop drivers which behave well in that environment.

This is currently not doable on Linux the way that it is done on NT.

[ernstp]

Still not in Padoka! :-)

[smitty3268]

very good to read. and to all the people who blamed the negative people all the years to be wrong about bugs like this now you have it black on white if people experience this developers better listen.

Huh? Marek said that the way it got fixed was someone uploaded a test case that allowed him to reproduce the error. That's exactly what everyone has been saying - don't just complain randomly on phoronix, go create a bug report and help solve it.

[Amarildo]

He's referring to what it took to make it so that the Windows NT kernel was (more) isolated from serious failures in drivers, especially display drivers. Windows NT runs display drivers as isolated processes, Linux has no such thing; and even if Linux had memory-isolated drivers, it would still take many developer-years of effort to develop drivers which behave well in that environment.

This is currently not doable on Linux the way that it is done on NT.

Oooh, I see. Thanks for the info

I do remember seeing "Hardware Virtualization coming to Linux" somewhere, though.

[kamild1996]

Wow... For someone like me who plays TF2 a lot, this exact bug was what was holding me back from using/switching to Linux. Thank you a lot for your efforts Marek!