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Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?

197 pointsby opengearsover 1 year ago

25 comments

loup-vaillantover 1 year ago
They don&#x27;t necessarily have to: there&#x27;s another, more comprehensive hammer they (or the US for that matter) could use: disallow vertical integration.<p>Force hardware vendors to <i>only</i> sell hardware. If any software that can be changed remotely or by the user is off limits. Even firmware. Conversely, software vendors can <i>only</i> sell (or freely distribute) software. For vendors from abroad, don&#x27;t go extra-territorial, just force them to chose: either they only sell hardware in the EU, or they only sell software. Intel and microsoft would have no problem. NVDIA might complain very loudly. Apple would likely have to split itself.<p>Now the complicated part is how to define a company. We don&#x27;t want a single company to just split itself into 2 legal entities that work so closely together they might as well be the same company.<p>Do that, and you&#x27;ll get much better than device drivers for <i>one</i> free OS. You&#x27;ll get the necessary specs required to make it work on <i>all</i> OSes. Even better, the user-facing hardware interface will start to matter, and there will be some selection pressure to drive the more complex ones, or the non-standard ones, out of the market. (Won&#x27;t be ideal, I can see a particular over-complex architecture win out, similar to x86, but at least there won&#x27;t be that many left, so writing a driver for most devices will actually be possible).
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jandreseover 1 year ago
More likely they would require companies to publish specs suitable for driver authors. I’ve always thought that companies treating their register configuration and I&#x2F;O offsets as a trade secret is ridiculous.
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doikorover 1 year ago
Why should EU give preference to Linux over any other operating system?<p>A much more EU &quot;style&quot; directive would be to force the companies to release enough of the specs so anyone can write the driver if they want to.
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TacticalCoderover 1 year ago
&gt; Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?<p>&gt; Why are these companies like intel, Razer, nvidia or AMD..<p>The question makes no sense. As one of the Reddit comment says: Intel and AMD are among the biggest contributors to the Linux kernel.<p>The real-world is pretty much powered by millions of Linux machines running on Intel or AMD hardware (for the most part). Try replacing that with Windows servers and their &quot;working drivers&quot; and then we talk.
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webmobdevover 1 year ago
Remember how old electrical appliances used to come with full circuit diagrams to help repair them? That&#x27;s one way to go about this is - force hardware manufacturers to provide complete device and technical specification (e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datasheets.raspberrypi.com&#x2F;rp2040&#x2F;rp2040-datasheet.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datasheets.raspberrypi.com&#x2F;rp2040&#x2F;rp2040-datasheet.p...</a> (PDF)) for every hardware they manufacture. This should enable any competent system developers to create the drivers for it, for any software system. (After all, realistically, we cannot force hardware manufacturers to create drivers for every OS in the world).<p>One major objection we can expect is that sometimes hardware manufacturers deliberately cripple their products through their drivers. This enables them to sell a cheaper version, that is crippled, and a costlier one that isn&#x27;t. One example of this is Intel and AMD manufacturing a quad-core processor, but selling the same processor as dual-core and quad-core (remember how AMD allowed you to &quot;unlock&quot; extra cores on their processors?). I think NVIDIA also limits some of their graphic card with their drivers, to sell the same hardware at different prices.
gjsman-1000over 1 year ago
Drivers… I don’t know if I could sign on for that for the following reasons:<p>1. The burden it would put on smaller manufacturers and companies (every little regulation adds up), especially difficult considering the comparative lack of qualified developers<p>2. Drivers != Quality, Upstreamable Drivers. Making the judgements of Linux maintainers legally binding is a bad idea. Case in point: Apple has Linux drivers internally, they’re just not complete or upstreamable. You would be forced to fight the Linux maintainers (and the power trips they already have!) in order to legally sell your product.<p>3. If we can force companies to support Linux, why not force all websites to support Firefox? Why not force all desktop programs like Adobe to support Linux? Etc…<p>4. What about poor FreeBSD? Serenity OS? That guy who still loves OS&#x2F;2?
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almatabataover 1 year ago
As others have pointed out why single out linux? Why not BSD? And second which linux? 4.14? 5.10? 6.2? Can they release it for linux 2.7 and call it a day afterwards? Supporting linux requires effort and money. How would you go about defining &quot;reasonable effort&quot; at supporting linux. If it breaks every month? every year? Enforcing this simply would turn out to become a nightmare. I think a better approach would look like what jandrese said in this thread. Force them to publish the specs so other companies or individuals can write open source drivers for the hardware.
the_biotover 1 year ago
&gt; being forced to make drivers that work equally in linux, windows and even macOS<p>That is almost a recipe for drivers built on hardware abstraction layers (HALs), so vendors can use literally the same code on every platform. That, of course, results in a bunch of unnecessary HAL code being added -- unnecessary from the OS point of view, which already has perfectly good hooks for all the stuff a driver needs. That&#x27;s the reason Linux does not accept HALs into the mainline kernel.<p>What often happens on Linux is vendors will then move their HAL and drivers into userspace, interfacing with the kernel via a shim instead. This has the side effect of no longer needing to open-source the driver code at all, since it&#x27;s not linked into the kernel. Look how that works out!<p>In case of Android, it was literally Google that did the HAL&#x2F;shim work, giving vendors a pass on open sourcing or mainlining their drivers.
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nooberminover 1 year ago
I&#x27;ve swung over the last few years from thinking it&#x27;s manufacturers&#x27; fault to realising that most of the fault here lies with the linux project itself. They&#x27;re the ones who have normalised constant churn and thus needing to keep drivers for hardware, sometimes many years old, up to date year after year or even month after month. After seeing the churn mentality affect everything mainly spreading from web dev circles to the rest of the ecosystem, it&#x27;s hard not to identify that trend as having been the norm in the kernel for decades.<p>I&#x27;ve only come to realise that blaming manufacturers for failing to keep up to date with a constantly moving target was totally unfair.
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exabrialover 1 year ago
Please no.<p>The idea is rooted in idealism, but absolute crap will be produced in reality.
jraphover 1 year ago
I don&#x27;t think the law being Linux-specific would be right.<p>But making them release comprehensive documentation &#x2F; specs and forbidding them from requiring signed firmware would be something.
WesolyKubeczekover 1 year ago
Look at the realtek drivers made by realtek. Reconsider.
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skirgeover 1 year ago
What I want should be a right and someone forced to provide it to me? Cool, until I&#x27;m the one forced to do something, then it&#x27;s exploitation.
phendrenad2over 1 year ago
Of course they could. Will they? Probably not. Should they? Maybe. Do I want them to? Hell yeah. Let&#x27;s light this firecracker.
danielEMover 1 year ago
Any &quot;vendor lock in&quot; practices should be considered as monopoly practices. And anti-monopoly laws are already here in EU. Just a matter of interpretation of what falls to monopoly.
jokethrowawayover 1 year ago
This is why society is screwed.<p>All these people don&#x27;t understand the dangers of socialism. History is bound to repeat itself.<p>The cost of the EU forcing everyone to adopt a standard is that next time a new manufacturer need to enter the market, it will have to cater to the need of the 1% (of which I am part, I&#x27;d love to have drivers for linux for everything).<p>Who is going to benefit from this regulation? The existing players who can afford to support linux: it will be peanuts for them and it will make or break a new broke manufacturer.
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devinpraterover 1 year ago
I can get behind this. It&#x27;d definitely be great to see VoiceOver, the screen reader on Mac, get some competition. Maybe then blind Mac users could do their work on Mac, even in Salesforce and Google Docs and Sheets and such, and not hear &quot;Safari not responding&quot; at the slightest sign of overused JavaScript. There&#x27;s a reason most blind people either use Windows, or don&#x27;t use a desktop or laptop at all.
gumballindieover 1 year ago
That would be amasing, and should happen. If you sell hardware you should include all documentation, code and support needed to use it.
chxover 1 year ago
<i>facepalm</i><p>Whoever asked this have not considered for one second what would it mean in a way that can be put into legislation to &quot;make drivers that work equally in linux, windows and even macOS&quot;. This is an incredibly, incredibly difficult topic. How would you phrase and likely measure &quot;equality&quot; here? I have no clue how to answer this even in layman terms. Perhaps someone would need to create and maintain a test suite covering all class of peripherals covered by the legislation and mandate this test suite passes. But even that would not cover performance. Much good does it to you if the video card tests pass unaccelerated.<p>And then the way this question is put forward also shows this person is not at all familiar with how the EU works. The EU does not have laws in the very first place. It does not. But that aside, the amount of study and coordination that goes into creating or amending an existing directive is just monumental. You would need a strong, compelling need to go through a multi year process, costing many millions of euros. In this case, the need was crystal clear: &quot;these new obligations will lead to more re-use of chargers and will help consumers save up to 250 million euro a year on unnecessary charger purchases. Disposed of and unused chargers account for about 11 000 tonnes of e-waste annually in the EU&quot;. How many EU consumers are even affected? Because mobile phone chargers, these days, affect everyone (above the age of three or some such).<p>Here&#x27;s a quote from the relevant USB C legislation:<p>Stakeholder consultations<p>The following consultation activities were conducted between May 2019 and April 2021 in order to assess potential areas for revision and the impacts of the suggested policy option in various areas:<p>– an inception impact assessment (2018-2019) targeted citizens, consumer associations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), manufacturers’ associations, and individual manufacturers;<p>– a public consultation (2019) targeted member states, citizens, consumer associations, NGOs, manufacturers’ associations, and individual manufacturers;<p>– two consumer surveys (2019 and 2021) targeted citizens;<p>– a stakeholders survey (2020-2021) targeted Member States, citizens, consumer associations, and manufacturers;<p>– targeted interviews (2021) targeted consumer associations, environmental associations, market surveillance authorities, NGOs, manufacturers’ associations, and manufacturers;<p>– expert group meetings targeted consumer associations, Member States, market surveillance authorities, NGOs, manufacturers’ associations, and manufacturer<p>And all of that was to survey compelling to use an existing, well understood, already ubiquitous standard.
sylwareover 1 year ago
If the hardware is not too insanely complex, until there is a maintained and properly written open source driver with public hardware programming documentation for some OS, a working linux driver will probably follow if this hardware has a pertinent meaning.
userbinatorover 1 year ago
I&#x27;d rather they force them to release documentation instead, documentation which they certainly already have, and which hardware manufacturers used to freely provide.<p>If they&#x27;re worried about IP, that&#x27;s what the patent system is for.
0xDEFover 1 year ago
A lot of the innovation in the GPU space and competition between Nvidia and AMD happens at the driver level.<p>This could be an
viktorcodeover 1 year ago
There&#x27;s absolutely no legal basis for it. EC technically may risk it and then lose in court.
poulpy123over 1 year ago
The USA could also do some work...
KirillPanovover 1 year ago
Two words: regulatory capture.