On Tue, Jul 06, 2021 at 07:35:55PM +0200, Daniel Vetter wrote: > Yup. We dont care about any of the fancy pieces you build on top, nor > does the compiler need to be the optimizing one. Just something that's > good enough to drive the hw in some demons to see how it works and all > that. Generally that's also not that hard to reverse engineer, if > someone is bored enough, the real fancy stuff tends to be in how you > optimize the generated code. And make it fit into the higher levels > properly. Seems reasonable to me > And it's not just nvidia, it's pretty much everyone. Like a soc > company I don't want to know started collaborating with upstream and > the reverse-engineered mesa team on a kernel driver, seems to work > pretty well for current hardware. What I've seen is that this only works with customer demand. Companies need to hear from their customers that upstream is what is needed, and companies cannot properly hear that until they are at least already partially invested in the upstream process and have the right customers that are sophisticated enough to care. Embedded makes everything 10x worse because too many customers just don't care about upstream, you can hack your way through everything, and indulge in single generation thinking. Fork the whole kernel for 3 years, EOL, no problem! It is the enterprise world, particularly with an opinionated company like RH saying NO stuck in the middle that really seems to drive things toward upstream. Yes, vendors can work around Red Hat's No (and NVIDIA GPU is such an example) but it is incredibly time consuming, expensive and becoming more and more difficult every year. The big point is this: > But also nvidia is never going to sell you that as the officially > supported thing, unless your ask comes back with enormous amounts of > sold hardware. I think this is at the core of Linux's success in the enterprise world. Big customers who care demanding open source. Any vendor, even nvidia will want to meet customer demands. IHMO upstream success is found by motivating the customer to demand and make it "easy" for the vendor to supply it. Jason
