DragonFlyBSD Pulls In AMD Radeon Graphics Code From The Linux 4.7 Kernel

[phoronix]

Phoronix: DragonFlyBSD Pulls In AMD Radeon Graphics Code From Linux The 4.7 Kernel

It was just last month that DragonFlyBSD pulled in Radeon's Linux 4.4 kernel driver code as an upgrade from the Linux 3.19 era code they had been using for their open-source AMD graphics support. This week that's now up to a Linux 4.7 era port...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=DragonFly-4.7-Radeon-Bits

[uid313]

Maybe Linux should pull in something from DragonFlyBSD such as their VFS or their HAMMER2 file system?

[skeevy420]

Maybe Linux should pull in something from DragonFlyBSD such as their VFS or their HAMMER2 file system?

Whatever they did would likely have the same issues that ZFS on Linux has -- compat layer and licensing.

[Mark625]

How is any source code pulled from Linux compatible with BSD licensing? Normally, copyleft terms prevent moving any code from a GPL project to any non-copyleft project. The GPL has terms that are not compatible with any BSD license. Namely, that source code availability of any/all derivative use is mandatory, not optional.

I don't see how this is possible unless Dragonfly re-licensed their kernel to GPLv2.

Edit: Never mind. The AMD drivers are MIT licensed, not GPL. As long as the AMD driver developers maintain a clean separation from other Linux kernel code, and no GPL bits get incorporated, this should be fine.

[Michael]

How is any source code pulled from Linux compatible with BSD licensing? Normally, copyleft terms prevent moving any code from a GPL project to any non-copyleft project. The GPL has terms that are not compatible with any BSD license. Namely, that source code availability of any/all derivative use is mandatory, not optional.

I don't see how this is possible unless Dragonfly re-licensed their kernel to GPLv2.

AMDGPU and Radeon DRM are under MIT license, not GPLv2.

[Volta]

Maybe Linux should pull in something from DragonFlyBSD such as their VFS or their HAMMER2 file system?

VFS? For what?

[uid313]

VFS? For what?

I don't know. Maybe it does something better than Linux. Such as asynchronous I/O or direct I/O, I don't know.

[Volta]

I don't know. Maybe it does something better than Linux. Such as asynchronous I/O or direct I/O, I don't know.

No, it doesn't. Furthermore it's DragonflyBSD which was inspired by Linux when comes to scalability.

[pal666]

I don't know. Maybe it does something better than Linux.

and what if it does something worse than linux?

[kpedersen]

Maybe Linux should pull in something from DragonFlyBSD such as their VFS or their HAMMER2 file system?

Importing HAMMER2 has been attempted in the past but had turned out to be too difficult. There are many kernel changes needed to properly support it.