DeVault: GitHub Copilot and open source laundering

The easiest way to think about Atom is like ACPI - it's a lump of bytecode that's interpreted in kernel context, and which talks to hardware the kernel could already talk to. We could rip out the ACPI interpreter in the kernel and hardcode knowledge of every singly ACPI board instead, and we'd have successfully replaced non-free code with free code. But we'd also have a kernel that didn't boot on a bunch of new systems until people had reverse engineered the relevant ACPI code and reimplemented it, and so nobody has seriously suggested doing that.

There's tradeoffs. I'd love to avoid having to rely on non-free code to make hardware work, and I'm not going to criticise people for writing drivers that do that. But the reality is that any such driver is going to work less well than a driver that uses the defined interface to call non-free firmware (in much the same way that we call into non-free UEFI code to set boot variables these days), and so there's value in the driver that calls non-free code existing, and also it's unsurprising that distros would pick the one that works with more hardware.

Luc's priorities on -radeonhd were probably based on his experience with the VIA chipsets that were extremely limited by what the BIOS permitted (and yeah it turns out that not being able to set any modes other than those that are hardcoded in the BIOS is not good!), but the outcome was also that his driver for those chipsets simply didn't work on all hardware - I had a VIA-based laptop that would just give a black screen with his driver, because the BIOS didn't match his expectations. To be completely fair, on Radeon I hit some similar constraints when I was researching reclocking the RAM for power management - the Atom scripts simply took too long, so I took out a bunch of the wait statements and hardcoded those into the kernel and it was great, and then after a couple of days of uptime the card would wedge during a reclock and also it didn't work on all hardware, so it turns out there was a reason that those were there in the first place. So I absolutely understand the desire to have native code for all of this, but also in the absence of vendors providing explicit contracts about hardware behaviour, a driver that doesn't use the defined interfaces is inherently going to break things.