3 ms·
DMA-buf was GPL symbol exported specifically to make things harder for Nvidia. This is well known and is not the first time mainline developers have intentional
by ryao 2y ago
DMA-buf was GPL symbol exported specifically to make things harder for Nvidia. This is well known and is not the first time mainline developers have intentionally sabotaged third party driver developers. Saying otherwise is contrary to reality.
Reusing code on all platforms is a reason why the Nvidia driver has long been so good. It deduplicated effort so that they could focus on making the driver better. AMD avoided this prior to vulkan and their drivers had long been a disaster until Valve started helping on Linux. AMD tried copying the unified driver approach for the vulkan portion of their driver with AMDVLK and had some minor success, although the community driver developed by valve is better and they would be better off porting that to Windows.
- ChocolateGod 2y agoBecause any code using it was considered a derivative work and thus should be under GPL too. That's what happens when you try and shoe horn non-GPL code into the kernel.
- ryao 2y agoIt was a maintainer decision. The symbol could easily have been a regular export.
- ChocolateGod 2y agoAlternatively Nvidia could of respected the software license of the kernel.
- ryao 2y agoThe kernel’s graphics drivers are usually MIT licensed. This dates back to code being moved from userland into the kernel for DRM, which was Linux’s idea. The Linux kernel developers are the ones who rocked the boat here.
- ChocolateGod 2y agoYou're confusing the userland graphics libraries (Mesa) and the kernel drivers (nouveau etc). The kernel ones are all GPL. The userland libraries are MIT because everything links to them, including propriety software.