5 ms·

> The code is GPL, nobody will arrest you for forking it. People will bitch about that too - see what happens to kernels of Android handsets, people will compl

by nells 4y ago

> The code is GPL, nobody will arrest you for forking it. People will bitch about that too - see what happens to kernels of Android handsets, people will complain that OEMs don’t want to waste time upstreaming drivers.

smoldesu 4y ago
Asahi isn't the OEM, so I don't really see what you're comparing here. Nobody is mad at Asahi for writing drivers from scratch for black-box hardware, it's just that the Linux kernel isn't really the proper place to hack together cutting-edge shims for unsupported hardware. Linux has a larger obligation to stability than it does to novelty, so naturally it makes sense that the line gets drawn somewhere. Unfortunately the Linux kernel isn't maintained by some trillion-dollar company with the impetus to sort out these problems.
- derefr 4y ago
  > it's just that the Linux kernel isn't really the proper place to hack together cutting-edge shims for unsupported hardware Presuming that the hacks only exist within a particular kernel module, and that that module only gets loaded when the given hardware is found, don't those hacks then only affect people with the (previously, and still mostly) unsupported hardware? Which — at least for hardware in the critical path to userland interactivity — is strictly better than their hardware not working at all?
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    I agree. The problem isn't with how the Linux kernel brings up new devices, and more with the fact that adding support to unsupported hardware is a long and difficult process. These kernel maintainers have more important, official contributions to concern themselves with. Reverse-engineered software support is tangential to the work that the Linux maintainers do, which is why I'm all-for Asahi unshackling themselves from the Linux project. Hell, they might even find sympathizers in the NetBSD/OpenBSD communities, which have always welcomed unsupported systems with open arms.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    If that's the case, perhaps DKMS is the easy solution?
chris37879 4y ago
People bitch about the Android kernel and its lack of upstreaming because we get stuck with perfectly serviceable devices that are dangerous to use because they don't get updates 3 years after we bought them. Forking a project with your only intent being to get something to market is a bad idea, see the current effort Google is having to put into getting Android back to the mainline kernel, and they're still years away from actually succeeding.

by nells 4y ago

smoldesu 4y ago

Asahi isn't the OEM, so I don't really see what you're comparing here. Nobody is mad at Asahi for writing drivers from scratch for black-box hardware, it's just that the Linux kernel isn't really the proper place to hack together cutting-edge shims for unsupported hardware. Linux has a larger obligation to stability than it does to novelty, so naturally it makes sense that the line gets drawn somewhere. Unfortunately the Linux kernel isn't maintained by some trillion-dollar company with the impetus to sort out these problems.

derefr 4y ago
> it's just that the Linux kernel isn't really the proper place to hack together cutting-edge shims for unsupported hardware Presuming that the hacks only exist within a particular kernel module, and that that module only gets loaded when the given hardware is found, don't those hacks then only affect people with the (previously, and still mostly) unsupported hardware? Which — at least for hardware in the critical path to userland interactivity — is strictly better than their hardware not working at all?
- smoldesu 4y ago
  I agree. The problem isn't with how the Linux kernel brings up new devices, and more with the fact that adding support to unsupported hardware is a long and difficult process. These kernel maintainers have more important, official contributions to concern themselves with. Reverse-engineered software support is tangential to the work that the Linux maintainers do, which is why I'm all-for Asahi unshackling themselves from the Linux project. Hell, they might even find sympathizers in the NetBSD/OpenBSD communities, which have always welcomed unsupported systems with open arms.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  If that's the case, perhaps DKMS is the easy solution?

chris37879 4y ago

People bitch about the Android kernel and its lack of upstreaming because we get stuck with perfectly serviceable devices that are dangerous to use because they don't get updates 3 years after we bought them. Forking a project with your only intent being to get something to market is a bad idea, see the current effort Google is having to put into getting Android back to the mainline kernel, and they're still years away from actually succeeding.