Re:AMD RDNA 4 – AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series Graphics Cards
by ChocolateGod on Friday February 28, 2025 @09:45AM
(#43206173)
Because any code using it was considered a derivative work and thus should be under GPL too.
That's what happens when you try and shoe horn non-GPL code into the kernel.
Re:AMD RDNA 4 – AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series Graphics Cards
by ryao on Friday February 28, 2025 @10:06AM
(#43206405)
It was a maintainer decision. The symbol could easily have been a regular export.
Re:AMD RDNA 4 – AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series Graphics Cards
by ChocolateGod on Friday February 28, 2025 @11:52AM
(#43207726)
Alternatively Nvidia could of respected the software license of the kernel.
Re:AMD RDNA 4 – AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series Graphics Cards
by ryao on Friday February 28, 2025 @04:07PM
(#43210890)
The kernel’s graphics drivers are usually MIT licensed. This dates back to code being moved from userland into the kernel for DRM, which was Linux’s idea. The Linux kernel developers are the ones who rocked the boat here.
Re:AMD RDNA 4 – AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series Graphics Cards
by ChocolateGod on Saturday March 01, 2025 @04:30AM
(#43217614)
You're confusing the userland graphics libraries (Mesa) and the kernel drivers (nouveau etc). The kernel ones are all GPL.
The userland libraries are MIT because everything links to them, including propriety software.
Reusing code on all platforms is a reason why the Nvidia driver has long been so good. It deduplicated effort so that they could focus on making the driver better. AMD avoided this prior to vulkan and their drivers had long been a disaster until Valve started helping on Linux. AMD tried copying the unified driver approach for the vulkan portion of their driver with AMDVLK and had some minor success, although the community driver developed by valve is better and they would be better off porting that to Windows.