Vetter: Upstream Graphics: Too Little, Too Late

Daniel Vetter has posted a summary of his LPC talk on kernel graphics drivers. "Unfortunately the business case for 'upstream first' on the kernel side is completely broken. Not for open source, and not for any fundamental reasons, but simply because the kernel moves too slowly, is too big, drivers aren’t well contained enough and therefore customer will not or even can not upgrade. For some hardware upstreaming early enough is possible, but graphics simply moves too fast: By the time the upstreamed driver is actually in shipping distros, it’s already one hardware generation behind. And missing almost a year of tuning and performance improvements. Worse it’s not just new hardware, but also GL and Vulkan versions that won’t work on older kernels due to missing features, fragmenting the ecosystem further."

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