[williadc]

> I get the pragmatism but we also need to be realistic

I think what you mean is "I get the idealism but you also need to be realistic." It's not pragmatic to stand your guns and ask a multi-million dollar company to change the code they submit to your open-source project.

[broodbucket]

It's not pragmatic to allow a specific vendor to dump 100k LOC in your project that you have to maintain indefinitely so their developers have an easier time writing for both Windows and Linux.

In my opinion the existing AMDGPU code isn't exactly spectacular as it is. They barely have comments or commit messages and there's a ton of duplication. Linux has issues with keeping driver contributions up to snuff as it is, without enormous vendor-specific HALs everywhere.

[izacus]

There's also nothing pragmatic in one-sidedly denying contributions without understanding the case that rewriting a whole business stack for a minor player makes no sense.

What I see here is (sadly, again) two groups of developers unwilling to meet halfway and understanding each others problems. Expecting AMD to support a completely separate driver just for Linux is unrealistic. Expecting a 100kLOC code dump do be accepted is unrealistic as well. I don't see anyone talking about how to get over this hurdle on lkml, I just see the single least constructive word: "No."

Meanwhile, 3D support in Linux will remain a crappy tire fire which works well only if you use a completely proprietary nVidia driver.

[tremon]

I've only got one true power as a maintainer, and that is to say No. The other option is I personally sit down and rewrite all the code in an acceptable manner, and merge that instead. But I've discovered I probably don't scale to that level, so again it leaves me with just the one actual power.

-Dave Airlie, in TFA.

[Neliquat]

This position is so self-defeating, I really don't know where to start.

1. There is absolutely value in rejecting bad, or even good but unmaintainable code from your codebase. How is this even an argument?

2. The 'devs' don't just all meet and then decide to blow each other off anyway, AMD is simply in a position with Steam where they want it to "just work" for most games at the lowest investment cost possible. They took a gamble and lost.

3. A updated proprietary driver is not ideal, but works better than making the OS worse. Again, not sure you can really disagree.

[hashhar]

I feel like the LKML is the most hypocritical place I've ever seen. One one hand, we want that more people GNU/Linux which depends on the quality and performance and number of application programs that work on Linux, while on the other we seem to encourage developers to make closed source binary blobs because we keep on showing them that we aren't willing to accept code.

It is a lose-lose situation for a developer. If I write open source software, people will demand more and more from me. If I say, "screw this, I'm just gonna release a blob." they will ridicule me while ignoring the fact that I am releasing the blob only because they pushed me to. /rant

[sangnoir]

> It's not pragmatic to stand your guns and ask a multi-million dollar company to change the code they submit to your open-source project.

The maintainer explains the pragmatism explicitly:

> AMD can't threaten not to support new GPUs in upstream kernels without merging this, that is totally something you can do, and here's the thing Linux will survive, we'll piss off a bunch of people, but the Linux kernel will just keep on rolling forward, maybe at some point someone will get pissed about lacking upstream support for your HW and go write support and submit it, maybe they won't. The kernel is bigger than any of us and has standards about what is acceptable

Rejecting half-assed patches is pretty pragmatic, no matter who the author is. Maintaining standards is pragmatic because 'your open-source project' is the one that will be maintaining (refactoring/rewriting) the code in the future, not the muliti-million dollar company.

[sjellis]

> I think what you mean is "I get the idealism but you also need to be realistic." It's not pragmatic to stand your guns and ask a multi-million dollar company to change the code they submit to your open-source project.

That has basically been Linus' Torvalds job for the last 20 years. People want to contribute to the Linux kernel to get support for the thing that they are interested in, but often the code that they are offering should not be accepted as-is, because it will make Linux as a whole that bit worse. See DBus for an example where clever people strongly put forward useful functionality, and got push-back. The end result was that they went back to the drawing board, and designed something better.

AIUI, the reason that the AMD and nVidia proprietary graphics drivers are a terrifying mass of hacks on top of hacks is trying to say yes to everything. Years later, the vendors can only move forward by setting fire to the whole lot.

[omegaworks]

Thing is, Linux was never intended to run the latest greatest desktop gaming hardware. It was intended to be an open architecture where people contribute from all around the world to make something larger then themselves.

All of these people pretty much contribute their free time to it.

If they can't make basic architectural decisions that improve the worst kinds of work (driver authorship and maintenance is awful drudgery) how can you expect them to feel any kind of ownership over their fate?

You're asking unpaid people to do the work people get paid for. Even worse, when this work just gets dumped on those unpaid people by people who are paid quite well.

[egil]

Most work on Linux is paid[0]. However, asking paid people to do work that does not align with their employers interest nor the project maintainers, is on par with what you're asking.

[0] 4.5 Development statistics https://lwn.net/Articles/679289/. Just google lwn Development statistics for more.

[mixedCase]

>However, asking paid people to do work that does not align with their employers interest nor the project maintainers, is on par with what you're asking.

Oh but it is in their employers' interest. It's the price of admission for mainline. And if they want in on mainline, wether simply to harvest PR or to net a contract that demands a mainlined kernel; they have to pay it. Just another case of the well-known "cost of doing business".

In the case of AMD I believe they want to reap the benefits of mainline (that is, not having to support the breakage that comes with being out of tree) and to be able to compete better with Nvidia; since AMD is unlikely to ever develop an OpenGL implementation as good as theirs but Nvidia cannot or is unlikely to be able to open source their driver.

[tracker1]

It might be different if AMD, Nvidia and Intel all agreed on a longer term HAL, but that isn't the case... and 100kloc is pretty huge for a single vendor.

[ssutch3]

Haha yeah, because the Linux Kernel is just another open source project.