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Comment by captainmuon | Hacker News Reader

It's not a problem in the Windows world that drivers are not open source. I think rather than forcing them to put the drivers under GPL, we should fix the fact that embedded systems always need custom images.

On x86, you can just grab a Windows or Linux .iso and it will enumerate all hardware via PnP and install the appropriate drivers. This is something that is sorely missing in the Arm world. Instead you get semi-closed BSPs, source code thrown over the wall, and you have to write your own device-tree files and often kernel code to get something to run. SSBA is a start but only targeting the server market.

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Maybe it's not a problem for you if you upgrade your hardware frequently (and don't care that it stops working on newer versions of Windows because the vendor couldn't give a shit about keeping the driver up to date), and buy exclusively high quality (and high price) parts. I had enough fun with Realtek / GPU drivers (from all three major vendors) on Windows to hate the very concept of a proprietary driver to the end of my life.

The very same hardware somehow works perfectly fine on Linux. No kernel panics (not a single one in 12+ years of running it on Realtek crap), no intermittent connectivity problems, no weird GPU bugs, nothing of the sort.

I forget that you have to hedge every comment on HN :-P Of course there are not zero problems on Windows. I had a bunch of trouble when Windows 10 came out with a laptop I bought just before, I never got the touchpad working as expected. With Linux the touchpad works fine, but then yellow looks like mustard on the screen...

What I mean is: I can go to the store and buy a random thing, and I can just assume there will be a driver at all and my PC will find it.

I work for a company which manufactures industrial PCs with touch interfaces, and one thing we noticed with our X86 line is that we can just stop caring about drivers. Although everything down to the touch panel and the mainboard is custom, you can just throw a windows OR a Linux (Ubuntu) iso at it and it will work 99%. This is not about Windows vs. Linux, but about PnP vs. no PnP.

My netbook still has working drivers for Windows 10 with DX11 and GL 4.1 support, whereas the super cool open source AMD driver doesn't offer anything better than GL 3.3 with hardware video decoding that kind of works on full moons.

Yet if you want to keep up with hardware then running linux is a real pain. Want to use vanilla Debian on a 5900x and 6800xt. HAHA. Issues galore.

(Still not reason enough for me to go back to Windows tho)

Well yeah, trying to use modern hardware on ancient software is going to suck. It's like trying to run a RTX3090 on Windows XP. Debian stable is not a sensible choice for new shiny things, especially GPUs, and that's not really a "Linux" problem, it's a Debian problem.

> It's not a problem in the Windows world that drivers are not open source

Yes it is. Let alone the inability to study the source code and other goodness of open source, there are old drivers that are not maintained anymore and that can't run on newer versions of Windows, where hardware that is not maintained anymore by the manufacturer still works on Linux because the open source driver can still be adapted to run on newer versions.

Pity it doesn't apply to all cards supported by AMD open source drivers.

> It's not a problem in the Windows world that drivers are not open source.

It absolutely is a problem. There is plenty of not-that-old hardware that will only work on previous versions of windows.

There's also _mountains_ of _terrible_ binary drivers that cause serious stability concerns.

Broken binary drivers was also one of the main causes of the "blue screen of death" which gave certain versions of Windows such a bad reputation.

I'd say the reason generic kernels/images are missing in the ARM world is because people generally don't run their own software on the ARM hardware they own. And the reason for that in turn is that often people don't have the ability to run their own software on their ARM hardware. Which brings us back to the GPL - this is standard "Tivoization", something that the GPLv3 tried to prevent, but unfortunately Linux is GPLv2... Still, for drivers that are open source and upstream, a practical consequence is typically that people are allowed to run their own kernels on the associated devices - which I think would give the PnP, generic image world you want.

This is all just to say, I don't think "GPL drivers" and "PnP generic images" are as separate as you're suggesting.

I have working hardware that is no longer usable under Windows because drivers no longer work. Hardware companies have no interest supporting old hardware and they drop support in a few years. I recently got a new computer at work with a part that it's already considered "legacy" in the vendor's web site.

Closed source drivers are a nightmare for users.

Hmm, makes me wonder if it's feasible (for really popular hardware where there is sufficient interest) to just port the open source Linux drivers over to Windows kernel and release it under GPL. Maybe even charge some money for the effort/to be able to download the installation kit (as I think there may be costs involved in getting access to the Windows kernel driver development kit that would allow to build the driver).

It is a problem on windows too. I've seem various devices that simply stopped working when you updated from win9x to XP, from XP to 7 from 7 to ...

Proprietary drivers are a problem wherever they exist.

Spoken as someone that is not struggling to run older hardware on modern Windows. Windows 10 likes to screw up my audio (Creative X-Fi Titanium) every major update. No problems on Linux with updating the kernel almost every week for many years now.

There are arm phones you can buy now that will boot the aarch64 defconfig kernel from mainline. If a phone doesn't do that it's because the manufacturer doesn't want it to, not because there's something special about arm that prevents it.

How does apple m1 implement PnP?

It largely does not.

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