On Sun, Jul 4, 2010 at 9:03 PM, Theodore Tso tytso@mit.edu 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.