>They are drawing everything in userspace with fast graphics render...
Dumb question, does this mean that it's limited to software rendering only? You need to go through the kernel to talk to the GPU, right?
Dumb question, does this mean that it's limited to software rendering only? You need to go through the kernel to talk to the GPU, right?
That's sort of the whole point behind Mantle/Vulkan/Metal/DX12.
In the cases where it does, I imagine it's a situation where you're actually doing 3D-accelerated renders of the user interface. In which case, when the graphics subsystem craps out, hasn't your running system been rendered effectively unusable anyway?
I get that this is a nice idea in theory, but does it actually improve anything practical in practice?
If not, how exactly do you plan to restart the graphics process?
ssh from my phone and restart the driver.
Go to a fallback ui, and restart the driver.
Have a system util notice the driver is misbehaving incorrectly, and restart it.
Then there's the whole "GPL mafia" in the Linux world who'd like to force vendors to open up their drivers by moving as much of the critical pieces to the kernel as possible. In theory, you cannot write a kernel driver without violating the GPL. Fuchsia will have no such impositions. If someone wants to open their driver up, they could. If they believe their offering is superior, and a secret sauce needs protecting, they can keep it closed
Sure, it is, for lots of people. Even, apparently, the FSF, hence the reason non-consumer products are not subject to anti-tivoization rules in GPLv3.
Some businesses feel threatened by some open source licenses and other businesses are using the same open source licenses to do the threatening.
The funding for many important open source projects comes from global corporations that use it as part of their strategy, sometimes dominating entire industries based on open source.
A large number of small consulting businesses are based entirely on open source software as well.
Open source is not meant to be anti-commercial, nor would that make any sense, because "commercial" is what most of us do to make a living. That is not what takes away anyone's freedoms.
What does take away many freedoms is the fact that none of the widely used open source licenses fulfill their original purpose.
Linking rights to distribution once meant that users of the software got those rights. Now, in the age of the data center, end users get no rights at all and software can be modified freely by those who run the data centers without granting anyone access to those modifications.
Software has become more opaque than it has ever been before since the dawn of the PC age. Even without access to source code we had more control over Microsoft Excel than we now have over anything that runs in a data center, regardless of whether it is nominally "open source" or not.
Both the PS4 and the Nintendo Switch run on FreeBSD, by the way.
Not exactly from what I've read, the PS4 runs 'Orbis OS' which is based upon FreeBSD 9, meanwhile the Nintendo Switch is using the network stack from FreeBSD, but also stuff from Android and the custom OS they wrote for 3DS.
Do you see many vendors being forced into change?
For non-GPUs, only some WiFi drivers are out-of-tree (Realtek and Broadcom).
AMDGPU is already very usable. I remember ~5-10 years of waiting to use my Radeon 9600 with a recent kernel until the free Radeon driver was finally up to snuff. Catalyst and fglrx were awful.
Proprietary drivers just don't make sense. They are practically unmaintainable.