On Sun, Jul 4, 2010 at 9:03 PM, Theodore Tso <tytso@xxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Jul 4, 2010, at 3:27 AM, Dave Airlie wrote: > >> So its as crap as the others since the kernel space is uninteresting >> and doesn't give you any idea how to actually use the GPU, its just a >> slightly intelligent shim which transfers command streams and >> interrupt to/from gpu/userspace. >> >> Its like having an ELF loader but no source to the compiler or linker, >> and saying the CPU is open. > > We have sources to our web browsers but not to the a number of the > various web services that the browsers talk to (GMail, AIM, Gmane, > Yahoo Finance, Google Search, etc.). > > And we have the sources to the Intel wireless drivers, but not to the > firmware, and that's not necessarily considered a horrendous thing. > > And we generally consider our laptops to be open even though > we don't have access to the BIOS or the SMBIOS, which can > interrupt the OS at any time, potentially for milliseconds at a time. > > So the world isn't quite as black and white as you would make things > out to be... > Oh sorry I didn't realise I was downloading the 3D driver userspace via firefox, or it was shipping in a ROM on my board, or was running on a separate processor, and certain companies were rather more worried about just adhering strictly to the legal GPL than the reasons Linus picked the GPL in the first place. I will give that one area is less black and white, ARM GPU companies have no markets outside of Linux, the whole derived from a previous Windows driver is a lot more grey than it is if you are nvidia. Dave. _______________________________________________ dri-devel mailing list dri-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel
