Graphics Driver Frameworks and Security

Felix Kühling fxkuehl at gmx.de
Tue May 16 21:04:15 PDT 2006


Am Dienstag, den 16.05.2006, 22:32 +0200 schrieb Christoph Hellwig:
> On Tue, May 16, 2006 at 08:28:56AM -0700, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> > (BTW, someone should point out to Theo all the bugs & e-mail we're getting 
> > now
> >  about the ATI closed drivers not working on Xorg 7.1 because we chose to
> >  break the vendor binary drivers in this release.  Guess we've failed our
> >  lapdog role.)
> 
> The real problem is that X.org doesn't break the ABI often enough.  If
> you make sure the ABI breaks in every release they'll stop complaining
> real soon.

Who's complaining? AFAICT it's the users complaining, not the vendor(s).
Vendors will adjust to a new ABI, hopefully in time for the Xorg
release. Heck! They're able to track the kernel's (lack of) ABI too.
It'll probably make their code more ugly if it still has to
conditionally support the old ABI, but who cares if the source is
closed?

Break your ABI regularly and you'll regularly screw users forced to use
closed-source drivers. Eventually they may learn that bleeding-edge X is
not for them.

Cheers,
  Felix

-- 
| Felix Kühling <fxkuehl at gmx.de>                     http://fxk.de.vu |
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