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> The vendors won't do that because there's no stable ABI, which means that people need to reinvent the wheel. This is utter nonsense; I suggest you have a goo

> The vendors won't do that because there's no stable ABI, which means that people need to reinvent the wheel. This is utter nonsense; I suggest you have a good look at a "git log" of some driver files source files in linux.git, here's just an example: https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/drivers/gpu/drm/amd https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.... Edit: In particular, there not being a stable ABI prevents vendors from re-inventing various wheels because they can just argue for and submit enhancements and changes to various core kernel subsystems so that they better match the requirements of their hardware / driver, instead of putting extra code into every driver like they have to do on other systems where they have to live with whatever ABI was declared stable by the OS vendor a decade ago.

d33 10y ago
@the_why_of_y: what should I note here? That some vendors do that within the source tree? Yes, some do, but many don't, including a fair share of smaller ones.
- the_why_of_y 10y ago
  This sadly true, but I don't see how this is caused by lack of a stable ABI, more likely you'll see justifications such as "we need to protect our intellectual properteh", management at hardware vendors not understanding the development process, or just not caring about a niche market (in case of desktop/laptop hardware).
wolfgke 10y ago
Concerning the argument: > In particular, there not being a stable ABI prevents vendors from re-inventing various wheels Here it depends on what you consider as "wheel": If a hardware vendor has to write two versions of the driver (one using the existing wheel in the Linux kernel and one with an own wheel on other OSes (Windows, OS X)) this clearly leads to reinventing various wheels. On the other hand inside the Linux kernel there is only one subsystem wheel that is used by all drivers using it instead of reinventing this wheel for all drivers of some fixed type.
- the_why_of_y 10y ago
  Yes, it always depends... NVIDIA's huge blob is probably a case where they re-invented lots of wheels in order to share the same driver between different OSes. For something as complicated as a modern GPU driver, this could well make sense from an engineering point of view (legal objections notwithstanding). On the other hand, 10 years ago there were various out-of-tree Linux WLAN drivers, and each of them contained a full independently developed 802.11 stack, perhaps one shared across drivers for multiple OSes by the same vendor - surely having this much duplication of generic infrastructure that dwarfs the actual model-specific part of the drivers is quite pointless. IMHO only GPUs have an inherent complexity that is high enough that one could think about alternatives to just using the shared infrastructure that's already in Linux. But even in this area you see companies like AMD moving towards a Linux-specific kernel driver approach with their new "amdgpu" driver.

d33 10y ago

@the_why_of_y: what should I note here? That some vendors do that within the source tree? Yes, some do, but many don't, including a fair share of smaller ones.

the_why_of_y 10y ago
This sadly true, but I don't see how this is caused by lack of a stable ABI, more likely you'll see justifications such as "we need to protect our intellectual properteh", management at hardware vendors not understanding the development process, or just not caring about a niche market (in case of desktop/laptop hardware).

wolfgke 10y ago

Concerning the argument: > In particular, there not being a stable ABI prevents vendors from re-inventing various wheels Here it depends on what you consider as "wheel": If a hardware vendor has to write two versions of the driver (one using the existing wheel in the Linux kernel and one with an own wheel on other OSes (Windows, OS X)) this clearly leads to reinventing various wheels. On the other hand inside the Linux kernel there is only one subsystem wheel that is used by all drivers using it instead of reinventing this wheel for all drivers of some fixed type.

the_why_of_y 10y ago
Yes, it always depends... NVIDIA's huge blob is probably a case where they re-invented lots of wheels in order to share the same driver between different OSes. For something as complicated as a modern GPU driver, this could well make sense from an engineering point of view (legal objections notwithstanding). On the other hand, 10 years ago there were various out-of-tree Linux WLAN drivers, and each of them contained a full independently developed 802.11 stack, perhaps one shared across drivers for multiple OSes by the same vendor - surely having this much duplication of generic infrastructure that dwarfs the actual model-specific part of the drivers is quite pointless. IMHO only GPUs have an inherent complexity that is high enough that one could think about alternatives to just using the shared infrastructure that's already in Linux. But even in this area you see companies like AMD moving towards a Linux-specific kernel driver approach with their new "amdgpu" driver.