I think what you mean is "I get the idealism but you also need to be realistic." It's not pragmatic to stand your guns and ask a multi-million dollar company to change the code they submit to your open-source project.
In my opinion the existing AMDGPU code isn't exactly spectacular as it is. They barely have comments or commit messages and there's a ton of duplication. Linux has issues with keeping driver contributions up to snuff as it is, without enormous vendor-specific HALs everywhere.
What I see here is (sadly, again) two groups of developers unwilling to meet halfway and understanding each others problems. Expecting AMD to support a completely separate driver just for Linux is unrealistic. Expecting a 100kLOC code dump do be accepted is unrealistic as well. I don't see anyone talking about how to get over this hurdle on lkml, I just see the single least constructive word: "No."
Meanwhile, 3D support in Linux will remain a crappy tire fire which works well only if you use a completely proprietary nVidia driver.
-Dave Airlie, in TFA.
1. There is absolutely value in rejecting bad, or even good but unmaintainable code from your codebase. How is this even an argument?
2. The 'devs' don't just all meet and then decide to blow each other off anyway, AMD is simply in a position with Steam where they want it to "just work" for most games at the lowest investment cost possible. They took a gamble and lost.
3. A updated proprietary driver is not ideal, but works better than making the OS worse. Again, not sure you can really disagree.
The maintainer explains the pragmatism explicitly:
> AMD can't threaten not to support new GPUs in upstream kernels without merging this, that is totally something you can do, and here's the thing Linux will survive, we'll piss off a bunch of people, but the Linux kernel will just keep on rolling forward, maybe at some point someone will get pissed about lacking upstream support for your HW and go write support and submit it, maybe they won't. The kernel is bigger than any of us and has standards about what is acceptable
Rejecting half-assed patches is pretty pragmatic, no matter who the author is. Maintaining standards is pragmatic because 'your open-source project' is the one that will be maintaining (refactoring/rewriting) the code in the future, not the muliti-million dollar company.
That has basically been Linus' Torvalds job for the last 20 years. People want to contribute to the Linux kernel to get support for the thing that they are interested in, but often the code that they are offering should not be accepted as-is, because it will make Linux as a whole that bit worse. See DBus for an example where clever people strongly put forward useful functionality, and got push-back. The end result was that they went back to the drawing board, and designed something better.
AIUI, the reason that the AMD and nVidia proprietary graphics drivers are a terrifying mass of hacks on top of hacks is trying to say yes to everything. Years later, the vendors can only move forward by setting fire to the whole lot.
All of these people pretty much contribute their free time to it.
If they can't make basic architectural decisions that improve the worst kinds of work (driver authorship and maintenance is awful drudgery) how can you expect them to feel any kind of ownership over their fate?
You're asking unpaid people to do the work people get paid for. Even worse, when this work just gets dumped on those unpaid people by people who are paid quite well.
[0] 4.5 Development statistics https://lwn.net/Articles/679289/. Just google lwn Development statistics for more.
Oh but it is in their employers' interest. It's the price of admission for mainline. And if they want in on mainline, wether simply to harvest PR or to net a contract that demands a mainlined kernel; they have to pay it. Just another case of the well-known "cost of doing business".
In the case of AMD I believe they want to reap the benefits of mainline (that is, not having to support the breakage that comes with being out of tree) and to be able to compete better with Nvidia; since AMD is unlikely to ever develop an OpenGL implementation as good as theirs but Nvidia cannot or is unlikely to be able to open source their driver.
