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Comment by yjftsjthsd-h | Hacker News Reader

> they used git head mesa3d, experimental kernel patches to get the kernel part working,

In fairness, that's what I'd expect for new hardware; out of tree patches, then head, then unstable/rc/beta releases, then eventually normally stable versions. The firmware blobs are unfortunate, though.

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While it is reasonable to expect this much, we seldom get anywhere near that.

The usual fare is, unfortunately, just an android kernel source tarball that has been modified so that it works with the hardware, with no history of changes nor documentation of the hardware.

The situation with GPUs, specifically, is really bad.

Intel, AMD and now Imagination Technologies are about the only ones, that I am aware of, who seem to care about open drivers.

Don't AMD GPUs still have firmware blobs, they just happen to submit them to upstream linux-firmware?

Yeah, the open drivers don't matter a whole lot. It just loads the closed source proprietary blob into the gpu. It's a step in the right direction but can be very misleading.

The worst part is when those blobs are signed, then you can't reverse engineer them and replace them with open firmware.

This is one of many ways by which NVIDIA actively sabotages the open source driver effort.

They were catching up at some point, and NVIDIA started doing that.

The good news is that with the new open Linux kernel drivers from NVIDIA, Nouveau folks will be able to use the same signed proprietary firmware as the proprietary userspace component of the NVIDIA drivers. So that should unblock development of the open userspace component of the libre Nouveau drivers too.

They do, IIRC, but, interestingly, Nvidia doesn't only because they put a RISC V processor on board that keeps it's own blob a few generations back (20xx?). I'm not sure that's actually more open, but I guess if you can run it with all open source drivers and no proprietary blob, that's good?

AMD’s linux-firmware blobs also exclude OpenCL support IIRC.

They do support OpenCL. You only need their closed source user space library libamdocl*.so and libamd_comgr.so to use it.

The firmware blobs are normal, every major GPU requires them. Lots of other things too.

With x86 PC compatibles you expect the opposite: You can use old software and the system will still boot and be mostly usable but not with SoC boards :shrug:

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