[RFC] Using DC in amdgpu for upcoming GPU

[Deucher, Alexander]

Our driver code and most of the drm is MIT/X11 licensed.  Lot of other non GPL OSes (e.g., the BSDs) already import Linux drm drivers and core code.

Alex

From: Cheng, Tony
Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2016 10:04 AM
To: Lukas Wunner; Bridgman, John
Cc: Dave Airlie; Wentland, Harry; Grodzovsky, Andrey; amd-gfx mailing list; dri-devel; Deucher, Alexander
Subject: Re: [RFC] Using DC in amdgpu for upcoming GPU


Only DM that's open source is amdgpu_dm.  the rest will remain closed source.  I remember we had discussion around legal issues with our grand plan of unifying everything, and I remember maybe it was John who assured us that it's okay.  John can you chime in how it would work with GPLv2 licsense?

On 12/13/2016 4:40 AM, Lukas Wunner wrote:

On Mon, Dec 12, 2016 at 09:52:08PM -0500, Cheng, Tony wrote:

With DC the display hardware programming, resource optimization, power

management and interaction with rest of system will be fully validated

across multiple OSs.



Do I understand DAL3.jpg correctly that the macOS driver builds on top

of DAL Core?  I'm asking because the graphics drivers shipping with

macOS as well as on Apple's EFI Firmware Volume are closed source.
macOS currently ship with their own driver.  I can't really comment on what macOS do without getting into trouble.




If the Linux community contributes to DC, I guess those contributions

can generally be assumed to be GPLv2 licensed.  Yet a future version

of the macOS driver would incorporate those contributions in the same

binary as their closed source OS-specific portion.
I am struggling with that these comminty contributions to DC would be.

Us AMD developer has access to HW docs and designer and we are still spending 50% of our time figuring out why our HW doesn't work right. I can't image community doing much of this heavy lifting.






I don't quite see how that would be legal but maybe I'm missing

something.



Presumably the situation with the Windows driver is the same.



I guess you could maintain a separate branch sans community contributions

which would serve as a basis for closed source drivers, but not sure if

that is feasible given your resource constraints.
Dave sent us series of patch to show how it would look like if someone were to change DC.  These changes are more removing code that DRM already has and deleting/clean up stuff.  I guess we can nak all changes and "rewrite" our own version of clean up patch community want to see?



Thanks,



Lukas

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