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Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?
- dda09u 3y ago[flagged]
- Nellyz 3y ago[dead]
- jandrese 3y agoMore likely they would require companies to publish specs suitable for driver authors. I’ve always thought that companies treating their register configuration and I/O offsets as a trade secret is ridiculous.
- smoldesu 3y agoThis sounds much more reasonable to me. Banning unnecessary hardware DRM and requiring specs to get published would be a much more effective way to stimulate the market. Forcing manufacturers to publish Linux drivers would probably just end up in low-effort support on either side. The last person I want writing my Linux drivers is someone who doesn't care.
- jandrese 3y agoYeah, you know it would end up with the manufacturers just releasing a binary driver for exactly one point release of the kernel and calling that box checked. Might even just be some NDIS thing where they wrap the Windows driver to get it mostly working.
- msm_ 3y agoThis. Linked post is a misconception of how EU actually work. They will never "hardcode" something like "linux drivers" into the law. But, in theory, they could write a law like "If you want to sell your device in the EU, you must publish a freely available technical spec with enough level of detail to write a functioning driver".
- adrian_b 3y agoThis would not even be something completely new. It would just revert the market for computer peripherals and interfaces to how it was before the launch of MS Windows 95. In the MS-DOS days everything was provided with detailed technical information, so you could write your own device drivers, for any operating system. This ended in 1995, after which most hardware vendors stopped providing documentation and replaced it with MS Windows device drivers.
- lostlogin 3y agoThe days spent trying to get drivers to work and deal with their bugs and conflicts were seriously grim.
- scarface_74 3y agoDo you realize how much the PC ecosystem sucked back then?
- kichimi 3y agoDo you have any point of substance to make here? What do you mean by it sucked, and how does that relate to publishing driver specs?
- scarface_74 3y agoYes, it’s a dumb idealistic idea that never worked in practice. Geeks spent forever trying to get crappy drivers working IRQ conflicts fixed, etc. It wasn’t until Windows 95 and WinHec and “Plug and Play” that x86 based PCs became usable for the mass market
- jandrese 3y agoThat was largely hardware issues. In particular without a way to negotiate between drivers conflicts were doomed to happen regardless of who was writing the driver, especially with the relatively small number of resources to pull from.
- bpye 3y agoThis would be my expectation too. Though I’d think you’d need to go one further - hardware manuals AND a license to redistribute any necessary firmware binaries - the latter has been an issue with Nouveau for example. In fact I think manuals are probably better in a lot of cases, OEM drivers are routinely terrible.
- suprjami 3y agoIntel publish datasheets which describe their network interface cards to this level. It's fantastic, literally anybody can write a driver for an Intel NIC for any OS. You can also debug existing drivers when you get strange hardware issues, which is part of my job. No other networking vendor does this.
- gjsman-1000 3y agoDrivers… I don’t know if I could sign on for that for the following reasons: 1. The burden it would put on smaller manufacturers and companies (every little regulation adds up), especially difficult considering the comparative lack of qualified developers 2. Drivers != Quality, Upstreamable Drivers. Making the judgements of Linux maintainers legally binding is a bad idea. Case in point: Apple has Linux drivers internally, they’re just not complete or upstreamable. You would be forced to fight the Linux maintainers (and the power trips they already have!) in order to legally sell your product. 3. If we can force companies to support Linux, why not force all websites to support Firefox? Why not force all desktop programs like Adobe to support Linux? Etc… 4. What about poor FreeBSD? Serenity OS? That guy who still loves OS/2?
- ohdannyboy 3y agoDon't forget TempleOS, lest you be religiously intolerant.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago> 3. If we can force companies to support Linux, why not force all websites to support Firefox? Why not force all desktop programs like Adobe to support Linux? Etc… ...Although I agree that there are questions about required effort and breadth of support and burden to smaller companies, every one of those sound like wonderful outcomes to me.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- exabrial 3y agoPlease no. The idea is rooted in idealism, but absolute crap will be produced in reality.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y agoLook at the realtek drivers made by realtek. Reconsider.
- caeser 3y ago[dead]
- doikor 3y agoWhy should EU give preference to Linux over any other operating system? A much more EU "style" directive would be to force the companies to release enough of the specs so anyone can write the driver if they want to.
- mnd999 3y agoA much more EU style directive would be to force all operating systems to use the Linux 5.1 kernel.
- diego_sandoval 3y agoA much more EU style directive would be to force all operating systems to ask on every boot: Do you consent for this OS to store files on your hard drive?
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoNo, the EU version of that would be requiring OSs to ask before using a disk, and certain proprietary OSs deciding to spam the user with requests on every boot until they consent - at which point suddenly the OS can magically remember that preference - and then pretending that the law forced them to do that even though it said no such thing.
- amelius 3y agoThat's also fine.
- loup-vaillant 3y agoThey don't necessarily have to: there's another, more comprehensive hammer they (or the US for that matter) could use: disallow vertical integration. Force hardware vendors to only sell hardware. If any software that can be changed remotely or by the user is off limits. Even firmware. Conversely, software vendors can only sell (or freely distribute) software. For vendors from abroad, don't go extra-territorial, just force them to chose: either they only sell hardware in the EU, or they only sell software. Intel and microsoft would have no problem. NVDIA might complain very loudly. Apple would likely have to split itself. Now the complicated part is how to define a company. We don't want a single company to just split itself into 2 legal entities that work so closely together they might as well be the same company. Do that, and you'll get much better than device drivers for one free OS. You'll get the necessary specs required to make it work on all OSes. Even better, the user-facing hardware interface will start to matter, and there will be some selection pressure to drive the more complex ones, or the non-standard ones, out of the market. (Won't be ideal, I can see a particular over-complex architecture win out, similar to x86, but at least there won't be that many left, so writing a driver for most devices will actually be possible).
- gjsman-1000 3y agoSounds great - there’s just one problem: The desktop applications will still almost entirely be written for Windows. Or MacOS. Or Android. So yay, you can buy a device… and 99% of people will install the same OS on it that it would have originally come with anyway. What’s the point here? You’d have to say desktop apps must support all competing operating systems. But, hah, good luck with that.
- loup-vaillant 3y agoThe hope is that hardware interfaces harmonise to the point where writing a new OS becomes actually possible. Right now it's not, there simply is too much diversity, and that's before we talk about all the quirks in hardware APIs vendors currently hide under the software rug. Then maybe, just maybe, we could start some real competition on the OS space. Even if that doesn't happen I would be happy with the end of vendor lock-in.
- sylware 3y agoIf the hardware is not too insanely complex, until there is a maintained and properly written open source driver with public hardware programming documentation for some OS, a working linux driver will probably follow if this hardware has a pertinent meaning.
- almatabata 3y agoAs others have pointed out why single out linux? Why not BSD? And second which linux? 4.14? 5.10? 6.2? Can they release it for linux 2.7 and call it a day afterwards? Supporting linux requires effort and money. How would you go about defining "reasonable effort" at supporting linux. If it breaks every month? every year? Enforcing this simply would turn out to become a nightmare. I think a better approach would look like what jandrese said in this thread. Force them to publish the specs so other companies or individuals can write open source drivers for the hardware.
- skirge 3y agoWhat I want should be a right and someone forced to provide it to me? Cool, until I'm the one forced to do something, then it's exploitation.
- noobermin 3y agoI've swung over the last few years from thinking it's manufacturers' fault to realising that most of the fault here lies with the linux project itself. They're the ones who have normalised constant churn and thus needing to keep drivers for hardware, sometimes many years old, up to date year after year or even month after month. After seeing the churn mentality affect everything mainly spreading from web dev circles to the rest of the ecosystem, it's hard not to identify that trend as having been the norm in the kernel for decades. I've only come to realise that blaming manufacturers for failing to keep up to date with a constantly moving target was totally unfair.
- mschuster91 3y ago> I've only come to realise that blaming manufacturers for failing to keep up to date with a constantly moving target was totally unfair. The intention of keeping the kernel moving and unstable at the inner layer is intentional: it is a negative incentive to make people at least publish documentation, if not outright publish driver source code, in the open. The userspace-facing layer of Linux has remained very VERY stable over the decades, no matter the consequences [1]. [1] https://archive.fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/design_linux_kernel_api/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/design_linux_...
- eep_social 3y agoSorry but your claim is that Linux is the driver of churn?! That’s a wild thought. Hard for me to imagine how Linux could be more responsible that the incentives of capitalism, eg planned obsolescence, the race to the bottom, and consumer demand for more and better cameras, storage, etc.
- noobermin 3y agoI didn't claim that it birthed it but that the same issue I see in the unsustainability in software today is literally the norm in the kernel. If it's bad in one domain, perhaps it's reasonable to question its value in the other.
- pjmlp 3y ago
- TacticalCoder 3y ago> Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux? > Why are these companies like intel, Razer, nvidia or AMD.. The question makes no sense. As one of the Reddit comment says: Intel and AMD are among the biggest contributors to the Linux kernel. The real-world is pretty much powered by millions of Linux machines running on Intel or AMD hardware (for the most part). Try replacing that with Windows servers and their "working drivers" and then we talk.
- nextos 3y agoWhat could work well is forcing manufacturers to release hardware documentation that is sufficiently detailed to allow developing drivers without reverse engineering. Perhaps forcing them to do so a couple of years after hardware release, so that it does not interfere too much with trade secrets. This would avoid perfectly functional hardware to go to the landfill because of no further software support, and it would also prevent incredibly time-consuming reverse engineering efforts.
- Vilian 3y agowhat about releasing the source code of drivers/firmware after the official support ended
- pjmlp 3y agoAzure, and all the games being emulated on Proton as means to make SteamDeck a viable product.
- 0xDEF 3y agoA lot of the innovation in the GPU space and competition between Nvidia and AMD happens at the driver level. This could be an
- jraph 3y agoI don't think the law being Linux-specific would be right. But making them release comprehensive documentation / specs and forbidding them from requiring signed firmware would be something.
- phendrenad2 3y agoOf course they could. Will they? Probably not. Should they? Maybe. Do I want them to? Hell yeah. Let's light this firecracker.
- jokethrowaway 3y agoThis is why society is screwed. All these people don't understand the dangers of socialism. History is bound to repeat itself. The cost of the EU forcing everyone to adopt a standard is that next time a new manufacturer need to enter the market, it will have to cater to the need of the 1% (of which I am part, I'd love to have drivers for linux for everything). Who is going to benefit from this regulation? The existing players who can afford to support linux: it will be peanuts for them and it will make or break a new broke manufacturer.
- the_biot 3y ago> being forced to make drivers that work equally in linux, windows and even macOS That is almost a recipe for drivers built on hardware abstraction layers (HALs), so vendors can use literally the same code on every platform. That, of course, results in a bunch of unnecessary HAL code being added -- unnecessary from the OS point of view, which already has perfectly good hooks for all the stuff a driver needs. That's the reason Linux does not accept HALs into the mainline kernel. What often happens on Linux is vendors will then move their HAL and drivers into userspace, interfacing with the kernel via a shim instead. This has the side effect of no longer needing to open-source the driver code at all, since it's not linked into the kernel. Look how that works out! In case of Android, it was literally Google that did the HAL/shim work, giving vendors a pass on open sourcing or mainlining their drivers.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago> What often happens on Linux is vendors will then move their HAL and drivers into userspace, interfacing with the kernel via a shim instead. This has the side effect of no longer needing to open-source the driver code at all, since it's not linked into the kernel. Look how that works out! It doesn't stop anyone else from writing better drivers (i.e. the thing they already do) but decouples things so that people can at least update their kernel while keeping their drivers. So, win-win.
- chx 3y agofacepalm Whoever asked this have not considered for one second what would it mean in a way that can be put into legislation to "make drivers that work equally in linux, windows and even macOS". This is an incredibly, incredibly difficult topic. How would you phrase and likely measure "equality" here? I have no clue how to answer this even in layman terms. Perhaps someone would need to create and maintain a test suite covering all class of peripherals covered by the legislation and mandate this test suite passes. But even that would not cover performance. Much good does it to you if the video card tests pass unaccelerated. And then the way this question is put forward also shows this person is not at all familiar with how the EU works. The EU does not have laws in the very first place. It does not. But that aside, the amount of study and coordination that goes into creating or amending an existing directive is just monumental. You would need a strong, compelling need to go through a multi year process, costing many millions of euros. In this case, the need was crystal clear: "these new obligations will lead to more re-use of chargers and will help consumers save up to 250 million euro a year on unnecessary charger purchases. Disposed of and unused chargers account for about 11 000 tonnes of e-waste annually in the EU". How many EU consumers are even affected? Because mobile phone chargers, these days, affect everyone (above the age of three or some such). Here's a quote from the relevant USB C legislation: Stakeholder consultations The following consultation activities were conducted between May 2019 and April 2021 in order to assess potential areas for revision and the impacts of the suggested policy option in various areas: – an inception impact assessment (2018-2019) targeted citizens, consumer associations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), manufacturers’ associations, and individual manufacturers; – a public consultation (2019) targeted member states, citizens, consumer associations, NGOs, manufacturers’ associations, and individual manufacturers; – two consumer surveys (2019 and 2021) targeted citizens; – a stakeholders survey (2020-2021) targeted Member States, citizens, consumer associations, and manufacturers; – targeted interviews (2021) targeted consumer associations, environmental associations, market surveillance authorities, NGOs, manufacturers’ associations, and manufacturers; – expert group meetings targeted consumer associations, Member States, market surveillance authorities, NGOs, manufacturers’ associations, and manufacturer And all of that was to survey compelling to use an existing, well understood, already ubiquitous standard.
- webmobdev 3y agoRemember how old electrical appliances used to come with full circuit diagrams to help repair them? That's one way to go about this is - force hardware manufacturers to provide complete device and technical specification (e.g. https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2040/rp2040-datasheet.pdf https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2040/rp2040-datasheet.p... (PDF)) for every hardware they manufacture. This should enable any competent system developers to create the drivers for it, for any software system. (After all, realistically, we cannot force hardware manufacturers to create drivers for every OS in the world). One major objection we can expect is that sometimes hardware manufacturers deliberately cripple their products through their drivers. This enables them to sell a cheaper version, that is crippled, and a costlier one that isn't. One example of this is Intel and AMD manufacturing a quad-core processor, but selling the same processor as dual-core and quad-core (remember how AMD allowed you to "unlock" extra cores on their processors?). I think NVIDIA also limits some of their graphic card with their drivers, to sell the same hardware at different prices.
- danielEM 3y agoAny "vendor lock in" practices should be considered as monopoly practices. And anti-monopoly laws are already here in EU. Just a matter of interpretation of what falls to monopoly.
- gumballindie 3y agoThat would be amasing, and should happen. If you sell hardware you should include all documentation, code and support needed to use it.
- viktorcode 3y agoThere's absolutely no legal basis for it. EC technically may risk it and then lose in court.
- userbinator 3y agoI'd rather they force them to release documentation instead, documentation which they certainly already have, and which hardware manufacturers used to freely provide. If they're worried about IP, that's what the patent system is for.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- KirillPanov 3y agoTwo words: regulatory capture.
- poulpy123 3y agoThe USA could also do some work...
- devinprater 3y agoI can get behind this. It'd definitely be great to see VoiceOver, the screen reader on Mac, get some competition. Maybe then blind Mac users could do their work on Mac, even in Salesforce and Google Docs and Sheets and such, and not hear "Safari not responding" at the slightest sign of overused JavaScript. There's a reason most blind people either use Windows, or don't use a desktop or laptop at all.