The AMD Radeon Graphics Driver Makes Up Roughly 10.5% of the Linux Kernel

Re:The AMD Radeon Graphics Driver Makes Up Roughly 10.5% of ... by colonwqbang on Sunday October 11, 2020 @05:36PM (#24749303)

This is the real reason in my experience, combined with the bringup/support cycle that comes with hardware development. If you fork the driver for bringup, you buy yourself a lot of freedom to change things. During support phase, when the hardware is already in the hands of the customer, changing things is more risky and so you have to be conservative.

For example, maybe you had a chip bug in the previous hardware generation which caused the system to hang after several days of stress testing. You found a software workaround for the bug, but every time you touch the code you need to re-verify the workaround, which takes days.

Of course, the downsides of forking the code are also very apparent...

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Re:The AMD Radeon Graphics Driver Makes Up Roughly 10.5% of ... by gsnedders on Sunday October 11, 2020 @06:45PM (#24749776)

Another example of this in the kernel is filesystems: in theory, the ext4 driver can read/write ext2/ext3 filesystems fine. And yet the kernel for years had ext2, ext3, and ext4 implementations, each later version derived from the previous. The ext3 driver was eventually removed in 2015, but ext2 and ext4 survive.

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