Vetter: Upstream Graphics: Too Little, Too Late

Daniel Vetter has posted asummary of his LPC talk on kernel graphics drivers."Unfortunately the business case for 'upstream first' on the kernelside is completely broken. Not for open source, and not for any fundamentalreasons, but simply because the kernel moves too slowly, is too big,drivers aren't well contained enough and therefore customer will not oreven can not upgrade. For some hardware upstreaming early enough ispossible, but graphics simply moves too fast: By the time the upstreameddriver is actually in shipping distros, it's already one hardwaregeneration behind. And missing almost a year of tuning and performanceimprovements. Worse it's not just new hardware, but also GL and Vulkanversions that won't work on older kernels due to missing features,fragmenting the ecosystem further."