[pcwalton]

> In the mean time, Nvidia will continue to dominate them in the compute market. Maybe actually listening 9 months ago would have saved them some time and market share.

NVIDIA is about the furthest thing from a shining example of good behavior in the Linux kernel. By not having open source drivers at all, they're far worse.

(By the way, their closed source driver has a HAL too.)

[msbarnett]

Yeah, this seems like the kernel devs are making the classic "the perfect is the enemy of the good" mistake.

They're sending the message that AMD would be better off shipping closed source drivers, like Nvidia, because that would save them the headache of trying to get their merely good but not perfect open source drivers into the hands of users via dealing with Kernel politics.

But then again, what else is new.

[Drdrdrq]

I don't think there is much difference between blob and such code from the kernel maintainers' point of view. From users' point of view the difference is huge (freedom to tinker / fix bugs), but maintainers need to keep the whole kernel maintainable. Merging such code would be irresponsible.

And no, I don't want just "good" code in kernel I am using. This is not business. Make it maintainable so it can get better (perfect) in the long run. (yes, I know there are places in kernel where code is not even good, let alone perfect, but that's another issue altogether)

[kuschku]

The kernel maintainers can choose between continuing with reverse engineering and hacking together their own driver, or starting with the code of AMDs driver and adapting that.

And you really think continuing with the hacky reverse engineering is the better solution?

[angelsl]

Since when did writing a driver become the kernel maintainers' problem?

I don't think the AMDGPU driver not being mainlined really affects Linux. On the other hand, AMD will really benefit from it.

[kuschku]

> Since when did writing a driver become the kernel maintainers' problem?

Since the kernel maintainers, and other open source contributors wrote drivers?

> I don't think the AMDGPU driver not being mainlined really affects Linux. On the other hand, AMD will really benefit from it.

You remember the days when Linux never would work on any real PC because audio drivers, GPU drivers, everything was missing? Do you want those back?

Having shitty drivers in the kernel isn’t ideal either, just like microkernels vs. monolithic kernels are a tradeoff, but at least cooperating with them in how to get it best into the kernel (AMD rewrote ~100k LOC since the last "Nope" from the maintainers) would be a lot more helpful than this.

[IntelMiner]

The thing is though, if they shipped a driver like Nvidia does, where it's this blob that just wraps its tendrils into what ever systems are needed, that's not the graphics maintainers problem either

It's a net loss for users of AMD hardware (though AMD's hardware on Linux has been a dumpster fire for as long as I can remember) because they have to suffer arguably worse driver support, but that's on AMD for wanting to have their cake and eat it too