KMS etc.

Posted Dec 15, 2009 20:50 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1)
In reply to: The abrupt merging of Nouveau by jspaleta
Parent article: The abrupt merging of Nouveau

That falls under the "not ready yet" excuse listed in the article :)

The real point being that, while said work has held things up in the past, it was not blocking the merge for 2.6.33.

to post comments

KMS etc.

Posted Dec 15, 2009 20:56 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (5 responses)

Smiley faces won't protect you....

All I am suggestion is that if you are going to quote Linus verbatim you should be be quoting Dave's rebuttal in an effort to show some balance... because the truth of the situation is tied up in the communication between those two people. If you aren't making an effort represent the dialog between the two of them..then you are misrepresenting the truth.

-jef

KMS etc.

Posted Dec 15, 2009 21:30 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (3 responses)

It seems you wanted a different focus to the article than I did. The article wasn't about why Nouveau hadn't been upstreamed until now; some of that was covered with the kernel summit discussion, and it lacks relevance now. The article is why Nouveau was upstreamed now, and what the remaining issues are. That's why the bulk of the article concentrates on Linus's tantrum and ctxprogs.

Now, it could have been about the technical history of Nouveau, though LWN has covered that before. It could also have been about the legitimacy of Fedora shipping a driver that it had no intention of merging, but that didn't seem interesting. I wanted to talk about this week's events and the future.

If I have badly misrepresented things, I apologize.

KMS etc.

Posted Dec 15, 2009 22:01 UTC (Tue) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (1 responses)

You made it a point to talk about prior excuses... you didn't have to put those sentences in or link to Linus's post where he goes over the excuses that he's heard in the past. All of that is historical context that you decided to include. I want to make sure that the contextual view isn't overly one-sided since you decided to include it.

You could have just focused on the posts in the thread that talked to the current legal problems concerning signing off on the binary blob as part of a merge. Both of the Dave Arlie references I gave above include some discussion about the sign-off issue which you could have selectively quoted from. There's something significantly important there I think in the premise that Red Hat legal review has a higher bar to meet on sign-off into the upstream kernel than what is required to include in Fedora.

And if you wanted to be overly sensational there's the short lived Alan/Linus sidebar discussion concerning what the agreed on rules concerning sign-off and merge actually are such as the following:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/925580
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/925880

-jef

KMS etc.

Posted Dec 15, 2009 23:00 UTC (Tue) by jwboyer (guest, #23296) [Link]

I think the article was fine. Most of the points you brought up were covered last week on LWN already. A rehash of an article that rehashes lkml would be rather silly.

KMS etc.

Posted Dec 15, 2009 22:13 UTC (Tue) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link]

I thought the summary was more appropriate than trying to re-convey an entire conversation that anyone could find on LKML. Can't satisfy everyone though.

The links are there

Posted Dec 16, 2009 12:21 UTC (Wed) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]

The very first Linus link takes your to the Gmane archive of the
conversation which is where I go when I want to get into the details of the
thread (or watch a flamewar ;-). Much as I trust the LWN editorial staff
it's nice they provide the links to the direct source material so I can
always review it for myself.

In this case I agree with Jon, the focus of the article was fine.

KMS etc.

Posted Dec 15, 2009 22:01 UTC (Tue) by Tracey (guest, #30515) [Link] (1 responses)

I run fedora on a couple of fedora systems with nvidia graphics.

As much as I wanted to be able to use the nouveau driver I couldn't; it just wasn't ready(tearing, crashing. etc).

When time is permitting, I like to test out new things, and I've been trying to stay on top of fedora's nouveau drivers(usually getting the rawhide versions): but I still haven't been able to get the newest nouveau drivers from fedora to work.

For fedora users there are two ways to get decent 3d graphics to run on newer(past 3-4 years) nvidia cards. The first one is to go to nvidia's site and download nvidia's drivers, which I have avoided for a few years now. The second way is to use the rpm-fusion repository and install the nvidia drivers in a way that(I find) is less intrusive to the system.

I can understand red hat's position on this: That binary blob belongs to nvidia. The red hat / fedora developers have their hands tied on this. Unless Linus has some personal assurance from nvidia that nvidia won't be it's usual jerky self; distributing nvidia's property is not a good thing.

KMS etc.

Posted Dec 15, 2009 22:47 UTC (Tue) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

As I understand the issue, it's not known that the blob is actually nVidia's "property". Most of it isn't actually included in their binary drivers, for example, and is most likely generated at runtime based on the local configuration. That would make it similar to the output of a compiler.

In any event the Nouveau team appears to be well on their way to creating their own replacement, which should make the uncertain legal status of the captured blob irrelevant.