On Tue, Jul 06, 2021 at 05:49:01PM +0200, Daniel Vetter wrote: > The other thing to keep in mind is that one of these drivers supports > 25 years of product generations, and the other one doesn't. Sure, but that is the point, isn't it? To have an actually useful thing you need all of this mess > > My argument is that an in-tree open kernel driver is a big help to > > reverse engineering an open userspace. Having the vendors > > collaboration to build that monstrous thing can only help the end goal > > of an end to end open stack. > > Not sure where this got lost, but we're totally fine with vendors > using the upstream driver together with their closed stack. And most > of the drivers we do have in upstream are actually, at least in parts, > supported by the vendor. E.g. if you'd have looked the drm/arm driver > you picked is actually 100% written by ARM engineers. So kinda > unfitting example. So the argument with Habana really boils down to how much do they need to show in the open source space to get a kernel driver? You want to see the ISA or compiler at least? That at least doesn't seem "extreme" to me. > > For instance a vendor with an in-tree driver has a strong incentive to > > sort out their FW licensing issues so it can be redistributed. > > Nvidia has been claiming to try and sort out the FW problem for years. > They even managed to release a few things, but I think the last one is > 2-3 years late now. Partially the reason is that there don't have a > stable api between the firmware and driver, it's all internal from the > same source tree, and they don't really want to change that. Right, companies have no incentive to work in a sane way if they have their own parallel world. I think drawing them part by part into the standard open workflows and expectations is actually helpful to everyone. > > > I don't think the facts on the ground support your claim here, aside > > > from the practical problem that nvidia is unwilling to even create an > > > open driver to begin with. So there isn't anything to merge. > > > > The internet tells me there is nvgpu, it doesn't seem to have helped. > > Not sure which one you mean, but every once in a while they open up a > few headers, or a few programming specs, or a small driver somewhere > for a very specific thing, and then it dies again or gets obfuscated > for the next platform, or just never updated. I've never seen anything > that comes remotely to something complete, aside from tegra socs, > which are fully supported in upstream afaik. I understand nvgpu is the tegra driver that people actualy use. nouveau may have good tegra support but is it used in any actual commercial product? Jason
