Re: DRM drivers with closed source user-space: WAS [Patch 0/3] ResubmitVIA Chrome9 DRM via_chrome9 for upstream

From: Thomas HellstrÃm
Date: Mon Jul 20 2009 - 11:07:54 EST


Peter Zijlstra wrote:
On Mon, 2009-07-20 at 15:38 +0200, Thomas HellstrÃm wrote:
Politics:
It's true that sometimes some people don't like the code or what it does. But when this is the underlying cause of NAK-ing a driver I think it's very important that this is clearly stated, instead of inventing various random reasons that can easily be argued against. How should the driver writer otherwise get it right? Man-years might be spent fixing up drivers that will never get upstream anyway.

I think it would help a lot of there was a documented set of driver features that were required and sufficient for a DRM driver to go upstream. It could look something like

* Kernel coding style obeyed. Passing checkpatch.

* fully functional GPL user-space driver.

How can you argue that something as tailor made as a DRM interface can
be used without it being a derived work?

FWIW my full vote goes against allowing such thing to happen, and I
think quite a lot of kernel people would agree with me.

I would hope enough of of them would so that we can stop this from
happening.

Negative karma points to you for trying to chip away at the spirit of

As stated before this was a suggestion to clarify the field for driver writers.

If the documented set of driver features required is fully open-source so be it. Just let people know.

/Thomas


Linux.



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