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Comment by sangnoir | Hacker News Reader

> We're talking about having a constant up-to-date driver on par with Windows for a major GPU card manufacturer

Nvidia manages to do this without any conflict with the kernel maintainers by simply not mainlining the code. If functionality trumps code quality, AMD can release kernel modules.

Perhaps the best current solution for all parties is for AMD publish sources on github and release kernel modules while getting PRs from the community to get the code up to meet the kernel standards. When the time comes, it will be duly mainlined.

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Without any conflict, uh?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYWzMvlj2RQ

> Nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with.

> - Linus

Kernel devs are antagonizing the only two GPU makers that matters. Besides the kernel, there has been some flame going between NVIDIA and Wayland devs too. Open source devs are immature men who do not understand the word compromise.

> Without any conflict, uh?

> Nvidia has been the single worst company we've ever dealt with.

> - Linus

This had nothing to do with the kernel and everything to do with the lack of optimus support (years later, its still shit).

> Kernel devs are antagonizing the only two GPU makers that matters

Maybe the 2 should ask Intel for some pointers on how to contribute to the kernel the right way.

> Open source devs are immature men who do not understand the word compromise.

I suspect that's part of the reason the kernel is stable, and for that I'm thankful. Not compromising on code quality is something I wish more projects would do, if they had the well-earned political/social capital the Linux kernel has.

Out of the three common GPU brands found in computers nowadays, Intel's integrated GPUs have mostly been a very pleasant experience for the end user when installing any GNU/Linux distribution. It just works without any additional work.

If AMD manages to reach that level of out-of-the-box working graphics driver, that will definitely reflect positively on their brand of graphics cards, and might give them an advantage over Nvidia.

I suspect that working with the kernel developers and maintainers will also be beneficial to the driver itself. It seems to me that for cooperating you gain valuable feedback on your code from people well-versed in kernel and driver code.

Sarah Sharp worked for Intel and apparently didn't manage to contribute to the kernel in a way that would make communication with Torvalds particularly pleasant.

I extend my sympathy to anyone paid to contribute code to Linux.

She never had any unpleasant communication herself, for what it's worth.

Most people who are paid to contribute to Linux, including myself, are very happy to do so, and no, it's not a case of Stockholm syndrome.

to me Sharp came across as trying to score social points by being a "woman in tech" rather than being honesty interested in tech. Something i fear is going on a whole lot in recent years in the FOSS world.

I keep seeing already cash strapped projects go off the rails because someone decides that they need a gender oriented outreach program, complete with elaborate gatherings and whatsnot.

And when that crash and burns, their excuse for the cash bonfire is that the FOSS world is misogynistic...

> Maybe the 2 should ask Intel for some pointers on how to contribute to the kernel the right way.

Intel is not waiting for them to ask:

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2016-Decemb...

> This is something you need to fix, or it'll stay completely painful forever. It's hard work and takes years, but here at Intel we pulled it off. We can upstream everything from a _very_ early stage (can't tell you how early). And we have full marketing approval for that. If you watch the i915 commit stream you can see how our code is chasing updates from the hw engineers debugging things.

(More specific advice follows.)

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