Hacker News Reader

I really like that the AMD drivers are open source and up streamed into the kernel. However, that doesn't solve all the use cases. If I want to use newer hardware on an older distribution (RHEL, DEBIAN, Ubuntu LTS, etc) the upstreamed drivers will be too old. Distributing the driver like Nvidia or Radeon Software for Linux will still be necessary.

View on HN

You can always install a newer kernel - thankfully Linux is notorious for never breaking the userspace as a general rule.

It is a reasonable thing to want to keep the kernel stable for custom kernel drivers. So stable kernel space is also important to me.

The "custom kernel drivers" are the problem. Whatever they are, they should be upstreamed too. Trying to keep a stable ABI just causes problems.

That might be an ok solution for consumer devices, but the kernel drivers I'm talking about are for custom setups that will only be used internally by me. There would never be any reason to upstream them. Constantly upgrading the kernel just creates a lot of work.

Either way what you're looking for is a backport, open or proprietary doesn't change that. I think it's important to note amdgpu-pro already requires amdgpu as well so "will still be necessary" has already passed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com