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It seems that the only benefit of moving the proprietary driver into firmware in the near term is to reduce friction for distros. Canonical or RedHat may be abl
by bubblethink 4y ago
It seems that the only benefit of moving the proprietary driver into firmware in the near term is to reduce friction for distros. Canonical or RedHat may be able to provide better out of the best experience to their customers. Doesn't change things too much otherwise. Will be a while before anything is mainlined.
Increasingly, open source for hardware just means shoving things into firmware. Holds true for CPUs, GPUs, and wifi cards.
- robertlagrant 4y agoValve as well.
- sgtnoodle 4y agoI just got a Steam Deck. My hope was a PC gaming experience that worked with less than 5 minutes of fiddling to get a game running. I figured it would be disappointing. The UI is buggy and the first hour was rough. Once everything settled in, though, it's been a pleasant experience. The nicest, best thing is that the suspend button just works flawlessly. I can imagine the only reason that's the case is because Valve had control of the kernel drivers and firmware. Maybe they had to sign NDA agreements with their vendors to do that work. If their changes trickle down into the vendors' firmware blobs for consumer facing hardware, they'll have compensated a bit for the technical debt of other companies, made the world a bit better.
- dTal 4y ago"Just" shoving things into firmware at least means the closed-source code runs on a different CPU, often (but not always) isolated from main memory, often (but not always) with no network access, which the main CPU often (but not always) has the ability to power-cycle.
- sgtnoodle 4y agoIf it makes the hardware work to its design everywhere, reliably, and offloads complexity from the CPU, isn't that all good things? It's not like Nvidia is going to open source their silicon.