>Which is worse, a phone where you can't update kernel because of the closed drivers or a phone where you can update the kernel, with closed drivers?
Neither of those are good options because even in the second case, there are still vast swaths of code that upstream is not going to touch out of fear of breaking things, the end result being that you still get stuck with unfixable kernel and driver bugs.
>The open source community is not, for example, going to make their own high performance gpus.
The open source community includes a lot of companies. The high-performance GPU companies are welcome to join this community any time they like.
Every Nvidia and Intel competitor (AMD) is probably already reverse engineering their binary drivers and binary libraries trying to steal their IP, so Intel and Nvidia’s fears are imo justified.
If NVIDIA or Intel could easily protect their open source code from being stolen from AMD, the story would be different. But you can’t prevent somebody from reading even GPL code, being “inspired” by it, and writing something different enough that does the same thing with the same ideas. Like just look at the LLVM project were people look at what GCC code does every now and then for “inspiration”.
Intel's GPU drivers are free software, they even contribute them themselves, same goes for AMD.
I think NVIDIA's different because they have the Apple mentality of them being the real innovators, (regardless of fact) and building their internal culture on secrecy, closeness even to other teams within the company etc. I think they consider it as part of their 'coolness factor', together with the CEO being on stage dressed like a rock star from the 80s.
The fact that they benefit from Linux massively and that having an open driver would win them massive goodwill is not directly measurable in terms of their balance sheet, at least in the short term, plus it would remove some of the secrecy.
So no that isn't decent enough, and I only keep it like this, because it is just a little travel laptop that I keep on using until it eventually dies.
I don't get this constant obsession with mentioning how 8 years ago this and this on Linux sucked. Yes, it did, things improved considerably since then.
If you're only willing to run Linux on ancient, underpowered hardware and then complain about the experience, be my guest, but I think you'd be better served by a Mac.
There's a whole class of people who run Linux on shitty little laptops and then compare the experience to their brand new iMac. I guess somewhere there's still the mentality that since one's not paying for Linux, it's not for my serious hardware, only second hand.
As much as I'd have liked for AMD to get their shit together sooner, I am glad they eventually did and are improving amdgpu at a decent speed.
Indeed, that is why this Linux laptop is the surviving one that still runs Linux on bare metal, everywhere else I just VMs, if at all.
I can't figure out what you mean by "sabotage their competitors". The term sabotage indicates that they are performing actions to actively harm their competitors, how is that related to keeping your source, which cointains your IP, private?
The open source community includes a lot of companies. The high-performance GPU companies are welcome to join this community any time they like.
It is nice to hear that they are welcome :p. Which they would even feel more so, if there were actual incentives being offered rather than trying to make their life artificial difficult.
I think we should lower the entry threshold first. The open source and free GPU project was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw http://llhd.io/. After all, one of the main problems with OpenHardware projects is the closed FPGA ecosystem.
Still a long way to go of course, but I'm pretty positive about the direction things are heading.
IOMMUs solve this problem by giving hardware devices their own virtual address spaces.
A phone in which the kernel never needs to be updated, like with the seL4 microkernel.
A third solution could be to require device manufacturers to share their source code with a trusted third party (such as google/certification authority). This third party will make sure that the driver does not include any harmful code and provide signed binaries. Binaries could also be updated for newer versions that way, even if the original manufacturer loses interest/goes bankrupt. If the IP gets stolen, the device manufacturer could sue this third party, therefore business people will also feel secure.
It is not ideal, but I could be able to live with this solution.
Of course it will.
https://github.com/felsabbagh3/Vortex https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22492902 https://libre-riscv.org/3d_gpu/
Another crucial thing is texture mapper. That thing is really fast and usable even in the compute pipeline. Image support is (was?) largely optional in OpenCL.
Also I remember the last time people talked about this. PS3 was not originally supposed to have a GPU at all because the Cell processor was so powerful. In the end they had to ram in an actual GPU. While the Cell was just fine for vertex processing it did choke terribly in rasterization due to lack of TMU and dedicated HW rasterizer.
EDIT: I also want to emphasize the difference of target markets. On AMD one can go to the Nanite path for some of the rasterization. One must remember that it is a non battery powered device.
Memory bandwidth is really power hungry. For mobile, the likely target market for the Vortex and similar, one really wants to do tile based rendering. Ideally the way IMG does it. Even though theoretical flops of modern mobile GPU’s is higher than some old discrete ones their memory bandwidths are way lower, so no running Crysis on modern mobile even though flops would indicate it would match a good discrete GPU back in the days.
'21 years ago we got a new thing. Why on Earth do you think we're going to get something new ever again?'
'21 years ago we got yet another new thing. What makes you think we'll ever get a new thing again?'
Seriously?
Citation needed.
"Hardware vendors being unwilling to make the drivers they write open source" is a pretty fundamental reason.
Which is worse, a phone where you can't update kernel because of the closed drivers or a phone where you can update the kernel, with closed drivers? I don't think that realistically there's a third option. The open source community is not, for example, going to make their own high performance gpus.