Freescale Linux BSP review

[Nicolas Pitre]

On Wed, 22 Dec 2010, Tom Gall wrote:

> The very important part of this whole discussion is getting arm Linux and it's
> 3d driver situation so it TOO is the best.
> 
> Right now it's not and pointing to other elements of the system and saying
> "it's great" is besides the point.

My whole point, if I may resume my conclusion to a few words, is that 
most Open Source folks don't care if you can't open your code for 
whatever reasons.  That won't encourage them to compromise on their 
fundamental principle.  It's up to those companies to balance the cost 
of maintaining their ad hoc proprietary stuff themselves vs the cost of 
opening up their code so it can be merged upstream.

> This discussion is good, but for it to have a positive outcome, we need to
> turn the direction back to how we get to the end goal
> for arm 3D graphics.

Absolutely!

> It's not probably going to happen at once with one patch that does 
> what everyone wants. I think it's going to take graduated steps and 
> some compromises.

Yes.  However, as I said, those compromises may not come on the 
technical aspects of the kernel interfaces.  Just like it is unlikely 
for companies to ever compromise on their profits.  Any compromise 
touching any of those fundamental aspects for their respective parties 
is bound to always fail.

In other words, let's save ourselves some energy and give up on the idea 
that a kernel shim only for a binary only user space library is going to 
ever be accepted in mainline.  This simply will never happen, period.


Nicolas