Courtès: What's in a package

Posted Sep 22, 2021 22:01 UTC (Wed) by timrichardson (subscriber, #72836)
Parent article: Courtès: What's in a package

Good luck maintaining that.

Courtès: What's in a package

Posted Sep 23, 2021 17:17 UTC (Thu) by developer122 (guest, #152928) [Link] (1 responses)

That they were surprised about the C++ was the first hint. Just wait until they realize how much proprietary code can be involved in neural network accelerators (hint: it's almost 100% nvidia CUDA). I suspect the only reason they're willing to take this on is because pytorch recently picked up ROCm support which supposedly can work on the open source drivers, well enough. Otherwise it would largely be an academic exercise as you'd only be able to run it on the CPU. Even now it's not clear if the AMD support will take off.

(oh, did I mention all AMD drivers rely on loading and calling into the AtomBIOS ROM stored on the GPU? Yeah, that fight was lost internally between AMD and ATI *years* ago. See: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-or...)

Courtès: What's in a package

Posted Sep 23, 2021 18:03 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

The AMD open driver effort withered because it operated like a frat party - we all remember ajax's "bonghits" commit that blanked the radeonhd repo. I'd be bitter too if someone abused root access on a highly visible server to indulge in schoolyard bullying like that against me.

It says a lot about how little cultural progress they've made internally that their latest CPUs didn't even have a real cpufreq driver for 2 years before Valve stepped in.