Re:Nvidia to Acquire Mellanox for $6.9B
by sangnoir on Wednesday March 13, 2019 @11:57AM
(#19379946)
"Maintain" was too broad for what I meant: I should have said they'll future-proof your driver. Any future changes to the kernel won't break your mainlined driver - this is what you get for free, not defect fixes or other types of refactors. What you get for free is your driver working with all future kernel releases at the time of release; unlike Nvidia's drivers which lag kernel releases.
Graphics card drivers happen to be very complex beasts, somewhere along the stack they do need a compiler for multiple custom and often proprietary architectures, which most definitely no-one will maintain for free for you. There is a huge incentive to keep most of the code platform independent and only maintain a minimal kernel specific component. This part of the code base is a comparatively trivial part, essentially the kernel should get out of the way as much as possible. The kernel specific abstractions like KMS are examples of such comparatively trivial things.