Re:Bcachefs may be headed out of the kernel
by smcameron on Friday July 04, 2025 @01:51PM
(#44466515)
No, every gpu vendor out there would prefer proprietary drivers and with a stable ABI, they could do it, and would do, there is no question about it.
I worked for HP on storage drivers for a decade or so, and had their been a stable ABI, HP would have shipped proprietary storage drivers for everything. Even without a stable ABI, they shipped proprietary drivers at considerable effort, compiling for myriad different distro kernels. It was a nightmare, and good thing too, or there wouldn't be any open source drivers.
Re:Bcachefs may be headed out of the kernel
by charcircuit on Friday July 04, 2025 @03:48PM
(#44467335)
I never said they wouldn't. Having more and better drivers is a good thing for Linux users. It's okay for proprietary drivers to exist. The kernel isn't meant to be a vehicle to push the free software agenda.
Re:Bcachefs may be headed out of the kernel
by throw0101d on Friday July 04, 2025 @01:43PM
(#44466468)
> In such a hypothetical FreeBSD could reimplement the stable API of Linux.
Like it does with the userland API of Linux, which is stable:
It's plenty easy to make drivers now, it's just hard to distribute them without sharing the source.
There is absolutely no good reason not to share driver source though so that's a terrible use case to optimize for.
>FreeBSD (which is often invoked in these complaints) would have amdgpu for example.
In such a hypothetical FreeBSD could reimplement the stable API of Linux.