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Upstream Graphics: Too Little, Too Late

Filed under
Graphics/Benchmarks

Unlike the tradition of my past few talks at Linux Plumbers or Kernel conferences, this time around in Lisboa I did not start out with a rant proposing to change everything. Instead I celebrated roughly 10 years of upstream graphics progress and finally achieving paradise. But that was all just prelude to a few bait-and-switches later fulfill expectations on what’s broken this time around in upstream, totally, and what needs to be fixed and changed, maybe.

The LPC video recording is now released, slides are uploaded. If neither of that is to your taste, read below the break for the written summary.

Mission Accomplished

10 or so years ago upstream graphics was essentially a proof of concept for the promised to come. Kernel display modeset just landed, finally bringing a somewhat modern display driver userspace API to linux. And GEM, the graphics execution manager landed, bringing proper GPU memory management and multi client rendering. Realistically a lot needed to be done still, from rendering drivers for all the various SoC, to an atomic display API that can expose all the features, not just what was needed to light up a linux desktop back in the days. And lots of work to improve the codebase and make it much easier and quicker to write drivers.

There’s obviously still a lot to do, but I think we’ve achieved that - for full details, check out my ELCE talk about everything great for upstream graphics.

[...]

Also, there just isn’t a single LTS kernel. Even upstream has multiple, plus every distro has their own flavour, plus customers love to grow their own variety trees too. Often they’re not even coordinated on the same upstream release. Cheapest way to support this entire madness is to completely ignore upstream and just write your own subsystem. Or at least not use any of the helper libraries provided by kernel subsystems, completely defeating the supposed benefit of upstreaming code.

No matter the strategy, they all boil down to paying twice - if you want to upstream your code. And there’s no added return for the doubled bill. In conclusion, upstream first needs a business case, like the open source graphics stack in general. And that business case is very much real, except for upstreaming, it’s only real in userspace.

In the kernel, “upstream first” is a sham, at least for graphics drivers.

Thanks to Alex Deucher for reading and commenting on drafts of this text.

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