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Maybe it’s time to talk about a new Linux Display Driver Model

224 pointsby epsylonover 9 years ago

15 comments

doesnotmatterover 9 years ago
Yea, that&#x27;s cute, except that DRM can handle pretty much all of it. You can split hairs and complain about GPU scheduling which is inherently rather difficult because scheduling at the command queue level is problem very much alike the halting problem. The real issue isn&#x27;t that we don&#x27;t have the pieces we need but rather that we can&#x27;t get all the players to agree on using the same ones. On Windows you have one entity (Microsoft) that can post WLK and unless you pass it you won&#x27;t be certified and on GNU&#x2F;Linux &quot;a working driver&quot; can be anything from &quot;not catching on fire on boot&quot; through &quot;actually brings up display&quot; to &quot;oh, hey a textured triangle!&quot;. And I get it, everyone is frustrated because ultimately displaying a bunch of pixels, seems trivial, that is, until you mix in politics. You have NVIDIA, AMD, Intel and the community at large pulling all in different directions. With GNU&#x2F;Linux graphics support having marginal effect on the bottom line there&#x27;s little incentive to deal with it. And you&#x27;d still miss a controlling entity that could validate that &quot;works on Linux&quot; means anything but &quot;compiles with some random kernel release&quot;.<p>Everyone who thinks that writing great graphics drivers can be a spare time activity is delusional. The fact that we have Android with Gralloc (which in comparison to DRM is, well, a joke), Ubuntu with Mir, others trying out Wayland and folks still stuck on X11 makes this all so much more complicated than it needs to be (and SteamOS is rather terrible in this regard too, which is a shame because Valve is trying to do the right thing with Vulkan but SteamOS is just not a well put together distro, at least right now). It&#x27;s just not a driver model problem, it&#x27;s the politics of it all. Outside of Google adopting DRM instead of Gralloc (or Gralloc getting all of the features on DRM and effectively becoming DRM and replacing it on the desktop) there&#x27;s probably little chance of unifying all the drivers under one coherent umbrella.
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thrownaway2424over 9 years ago
The thing about being able to read other process memory under Linux has always driven me nuts. Linux is fairly secure _except_ for this one giant gaping hole that nobody mentions.
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tfrancoover 9 years ago
Still remember the days where one had to compile the kernel to enable sound in doom. The fact that most hardware is supported today is a blessing.<p>And agree with the author. X11 has aging issues.
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XorNotover 9 years ago
How much of the compositor problems will be fixed by Wayland? I know a big goal of Wayland is to address tearing and corruption.
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theodorejbover 9 years ago
In case anyone else has been getting the &quot;Bandwidth Limit Exceeded&quot; error when attempting to access the page, here&#x27;s a link to Google&#x27;s cached copy:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.yosoygames.com.ar%2Fwp%2F2015%2F09%2Fmaybe-its-time-to-talk-about-a-new-linux-display-driver-model%2F&amp;oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.yosoygames.com.ar%2Fwp%2F2015%2F09%2Fmaybe-its-time-to-talk-about-a-new-linux-display-driver-model%2F" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;webcache.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...</a>
ryanmarshover 9 years ago
It was time to talk about a new Linux display driver model 15 years ago. 10 years ago I gave up on Linux for this reason and switched to OSX
gkopover 9 years ago
I ran into issue 3) and a variation of 4) recently trying to accomplish what should be a pedestrian task: running Xvfb on Heroku. X11 is a pain in the ass to package, I spent a day on it and gave up.
pantover 9 years ago
I am getting this error<p>&quot;Bandwidth Limit Exceeded The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his&#x2F;her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.&quot;
RX14over 9 years ago
I am currently using 2 displays connected to my graphics card and one connected to my igpu on my Linux desktop at home, and it&#x27;s really not that hard to set up. Unfortunately the GPU does all the rendering and passes images to the iGPU, but I believe this is the case too with Windows. Also there are a few bugs when using this setup to do with monitor positioning.
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rootlocusover 9 years ago
Maybe it&#x27;s time to upgrade the hosting plan.
lolololololololover 9 years ago
Maybe it&#x27;s timw to pay for some more bandwidtth
yarrelover 9 years ago
Let&#x27;s incorporate it into systemd. That will solve everything.
nikanjover 9 years ago
New year, new Linux graphics driver model. CADT is alive and well.
Animatsover 9 years ago
Be grateful that graphics cards work on Linux at all. For over a decade, they barely did.
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stevebmarkover 9 years ago
This is a good example of one of the dangers and failure points of open source. When hardware integration matters, you&#x27;re going to have sub-par results if you don&#x27;t have a strong relationship with the hardware manufacturers. The best firmware is from companies that control both the software and the hardware. Linux fundamentally cannot have this relationship. Some things need to be very specifically controlled and designed, with business interests driving progress. Open source doesn&#x27;t help much with this. Trying to build a system that works fluidly with the larger audience, when the audience is independent corporations, is for better or worse a nightmare.
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