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No. GPUs typically work over the PCIE bus, and one can talk to PCIE via user space as well. In legacy systems like Linux the mapping of virtual to physical addr
by mankash666 10y ago
No. GPUs typically work over the PCIE bus, and one can talk to PCIE via user space as well. In legacy systems like Linux the mapping of virtual to physical address and generation of scatter-gather-lists (SGLs) resided in the kernel. If one moves the same functionality to the user space without loss in performance (which is what magenta seems to do), there's no benefit to kernel GPU drivers.
Then there's the whole "GPL mafia" in the Linux world who'd like to force vendors to open up their drivers by moving as much of the critical pieces to the kernel as possible. In theory, you cannot write a kernel driver without violating the GPL. Fuchsia will have no such impositions. If someone wants to open their driver up, they could. If they believe their offering is superior, and a secret sauce needs protecting, they can keep it closed
- michaelmrose 10y agoYou make open source drivers sound like a bad thing.
- cbsmith 10y agoNo, but pushing that agenda via architectural level changes is not exactly a way to get a good architecture.
- icebraining 10y agoAn architecture is a structural design made to achieve certain goals. They just happen to have another goal to achieve.
- cbsmith 10y agoIt's even bad by that standard. When you compromise the function of the system to achieve that kind of goal, you end up losing out on both.
- mankash666 10y agooffering no alternative but "open source" on Linux is certainly not the most business friendly way to go about it.
- milesrout 10y agoBeing business-friendly is not a goal, and shouldn't be a goal.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> Being business-friendly is not a goal Sure, it is, for lots of people. Even, apparently, the FSF, hence the reason non-consumer products are not subject to anti-tivoization rules in GPLv3.
- milesrout 10y agoBeing business-friendly is not and should not be anyone's goal in licensing software. Being business-friendly is shit.
- fauigerzigerk 10y agoIn my opininon, any particular license can only be friendly or unfriendly towards particular business models but not towards business in general. Some businesses feel threatened by some open source licenses and other businesses are using the same open source licenses to do the threatening. The funding for many important open source projects comes from global corporations that use it as part of their strategy, sometimes dominating entire industries based on open source. A large number of small consulting businesses are based entirely on open source software as well. Open source is not meant to be anti-commercial, nor would that make any sense, because "commercial" is what most of us do to make a living. That is not what takes away anyone's freedoms. What does take away many freedoms is the fact that none of the widely used open source licenses fulfill their original purpose. Linking rights to distribution once meant that users of the software got those rights. Now, in the age of the data center, end users get no rights at all and software can be modified freely by those who run the data centers without granting anyone access to those modifications. Software has become more opaque than it has ever been before since the dawn of the PC age. Even without access to source code we had more control over Microsoft Excel than we now have over anything that runs in a data center, regardless of whether it is nominally "open source" or not.
- makomk 10y agoHaving control over the virtual to physical address mapping and scatter-gather lists for GPUs is effectively equivalent to kernel-level access anyway, though, because it lets you carry out DMA to and from arbitrary physical memory addresses. Some proprietary drivers for mobile GPUs have even given this level of access to untrusted user processes in the past leading to privilege escalation to root.
- thomastjeffery 10y agoUnfortunately, the GPL mafia is right, and hardware vendors will continue to abuse their users with proprietary blobs unless they are forced into change.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoHow long has the GPL Mafia been saying this? Do you see many vendors being forced into change?
- frozenport 10y agoTypically only big vendors can afford not to change
- bonzini 10y agoFor GPUs, AMD is changing and even nVidia is using Nouveau for some chipsets. For non-GPUs, only some WiFi drivers are out-of-tree (Realtek and Broadcom).
- thomastjeffery 10y agoAMD is finally changing. Unfortunately, The amdgpu-pro limbo right now is not ideal... but I am very excited for the future. AMDGPU is already very usable. I remember ~5-10 years of waiting to use my Radeon 9600 with a recent kernel until the free Radeon driver was finally up to snuff. Catalyst and fglrx were awful. Proprietary drivers just don't make sense. They are practically unmaintainable.
- andrepd 10y agoThe "GPL mafia", how dare they demand their software's license be respected!?