[libre-riscv-dev] porting AMDVLK to the Libre RISC-V 3D GPU: NLNet EUR 50, 000 Grant application

[Michael Pham]

On Tue, Oct 1, 2019 at 12:35 AM Jacob Lifshay <programmerjake at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I'd be inclined to use RADV anyway because it has much more community
> support, is in mesa, and is not just code thrown over the wall (which
> is what AMDVLK is, since AMDVLK is basically AMD's proprietary shared
> windows/linux graphics driver rewired to use LLVM instead of their
> proprietary compiler.
>
> Will discuss more on-list after Michael's response.
>
> Jacob

I've responded to the whole amd graphics driver dispute off list. So
let's return to the subject of RADV with technical arguments. First of
all, even though RADV was basically started by Dave, he's not that
involved with the development anymore and many other Mesa developers
are working on it instead. We shouldn't throw away the possibility of
using RADV just because of the person who started it -- that would be,
in my opinion, disrespectful of everyone else working on RADV by
ignoring their contributions.

Secondly, if we do forget about RADV, then we should forget about
using AMDVLK as well for the obvious reason that AMDVLK is by AMD that
Luc seems to be so antagonistic towards. And we can continue to forget
about Intel and ARM drivers as well because, well, as you can see on
Luc's blog is antagonistic towards them as well. My point is that we
shouldn't let Luc's accusations (true or not) stop us from reusing any
of these drivers because at that point we might as well just ignore
every corporation's open-source contributions. For example, Microsoft
has done some very unethical things in the past and also has
contributed code to the Linux kernel. What are you going to do? Fork
the Linux kernel and rip out Microsoft's code? The RISC-V Foundation
has acted unethical as well by not being as open as they claim. What
are we going to do? Throw away all our work because it's based on
RISC-V? I think you get what I'm trying to say.

Thirdly.... ahhh I forgot what else I was trying to say :( If I
remember I'll send out another email.

Note to everyone: Luc is not Luke. Different people, not a misspelling.

Michael