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[News] The Balance Between Driver Optimality and Freedom in the Linux Kernel

  • Subject: [News] The Balance Between Driver Optimality and Freedom in the Linux Kernel
  • From: Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 05 Mar 2010 23:55:40 +0000
  • Followup-to: comp.os.linux.advocacy
  • Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
  • User-agent: KNode/4.3.1
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The Uniform Driver Interfaceâwhy wasnât it adopted?

,----[ Quote ]
| Imagine, for example, if drivers for graphics 
| cards, TV tuner cards, video and audio 
| encoding/decoding cards, modems, storage 
| chipsets, motherboard chipsets, USB chipsets, 
| IEEE-1394 chipsets, graphics tablet devices, 
| touch screens, debugging interfaces, network 
| devices, and so forth were all written to a 
| common specification, it would reduce the 
| amount of code which needed testing. It would 
| increase user choice in both hardware and 
| operating systemsâsomething which I still hold 
| is quite likely the most valuable freedom we 
| have. It would increase reliability, since the 
| users of Windows, OS X, Linux, the various BSD 
| systems, and other, not-so-mainstream 
| operating systems would be able to run the 
| same driver code and collectively supply 
| debugging information and perform testing in a 
| multitude of environments. It would increase 
| security, because then common code that is 
| well-known could be used on all platforms and 
| not just the one it was written for. It would 
| do for device drivers what POSIX has done for 
| user-mode application software. I do not 
| believe that I could be convinced that this 
| would be anything other than a good thing.
`----

http://mike.trausch.us/blog/2010/03/03/the-uniform-driver-interface%E2%80%94why-wasnt-it-adopted/


Recent:

Open-Source ATI R600/700 Mesa 3D Performance

,----[ Quote ]
| Our test system was made up of an Intel Core
| i3 530 clocked at 3.31GHz, an ECS H55H-M
| motherboard, 2GB of OCZ DDR3-1333MHz memory,
| and a 64GB OCZ Vertex SSD. On the software
| side we were running a snapshot of Ubuntu
| 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" that included the Linux
| 2.6.32-12 (x86_64) kernel, GNOME 2.29.6, X
| Server 1.7.4 RC2, xf86-video-radeon 6.12.99,
| Mesa 7.7, and an EXT4 file-system. Many other
| distributions this quarter and next are
| shipping with Mesa 7.7 and the Linux 2.6.32
| kernel so this should provide an overall look
| at what to expect in terms of the open-source
| R500/600/700 3D performance. Besides the
| already mentioned plans for future articles,
| we will also be delivering fresh ATI Radeon
| benchmarks from Fedora 13 to see how the
| latest bleeding edge code is performing.
`----

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ati_r600_mesa_3d&num=1


MD R600/700 2D Performance: Open vs. Closed Drivers

,----[ Quote ]
| From the three different test profiles we used and the two
| graphics cards that were tested, nearly every time the open-
| source driver stack wound up being faster than the Catalyst 9.10
| driver. Past tests of other graphics cards and drivers have shown
| the 2D performance to be better on the open-source side, albeit
| these 2D tests are not very real-world representative (nor do
| they reflect the CPU usage) and on the 3D side the proprietary
| Catalyst driver is significantly faster and more feature-rich
| than the current open-source code.
`----

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_r600_r700_2d&num=1
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