Valve is paying open-source developers to work on Proton, Mesa, and more • Hacker News Board

Re: Valve is paying open-source developers to work on Proton, Mesa, and more

#281

Post by Scramblejams » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 9:51 AM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #80

sgjohnson wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what is the actual drawback of these “huge” binaries? The problem isn’t size. The problem is that with static linking it gets significantly more difficult to patch security vulnerabilities, because with dynamic linking, the vuln is gone once the underlying library is updated, however this wouldn’t happen with static linking.

You need to be regularly updating the higher level packages anyway though, as they might contain vulnerabilities that are not due to underlying libraries. At which point, we might as well update them for library issues too.

But then you're relying on every single higher level package owner to pull in patches for all their dependencies and update their binaries in a timely fashion. That works for, say, Debian packages (my distro of choice), but as soon as you move outside of that circle it'll make it harder to guarantee quality.

In contrast, on (for example) Debian, I know that the Debian Security Team is looking after the libraries and that gives me a lot of peace of mind. Instead, I'd be wondering if every single third-party apt repository package owner is doing a professional job. At least if they're shipping binaries that are dynamically linked to Debian packages, I can have confidence that those library issues are being handled. (XML parser update, anybody?)

Re: Valve is paying open-source developers to work on Proton, Mesa, and more

#282

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 9:54 AM UTC

bombolo wrote: post #204

CamperBob2 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that, but executable images are demand-paged anyway. You can link 1 GB of static library code if you like; you won't pay the penalty unless and until those functions are actually called. The whole debate is just stupid. If it inconveniences even one fewer user , then static linking is the way to go, because of the sheer number of drawbacks that shared libraries bring. Nobody cares how big the executable is.…

But the called functions need to be loaded in memory for every process using them, instead of once. Also there is value in being able to fix a library without having to recompile everything.

[deleted]

Re: Valve is paying open-source developers to work on Proton, Mesa, and more

#283

Post by jeppester » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 10:33 PM UTC

emersion wrote: post #187

jeppester wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask how it's decided what you are working on? Given the variety of the projects you've mentioned it could seem that you have some degree of freedom, but I might be mistaken.

Yeah, there is a lot of freedom, it's pretty similar to how an open-source project works. Pierre-Loup indicates what features would be nice to have (in gamescope or other projects), I can pick from that list. Or I can pick my own ideas and work on these. Or I can discuss with the other contractors, come up with an idea and coordinate our work. Sometimes I work on short-term bugfixes, sometimes I work on long-term plu…

That all sounds great. I must say I'm quite envious of your job. Getting paid to work on something that benefits the whole community, and with a great level of freedom!

Unfortunately my skillset as a senior full stack dev seems rather irrelevant for jobs in and around OSS. It appears those jobs are mostly C and C++.

Re: Valve is paying open-source developers to work on Proton, Mesa, and more

#284

Post by ROTMetro » Wed, Dec 21, 2022, 12:16 AM UTC

npteljes wrote: post #203

ROTMetro wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, the users of Steam and what they post on their public pages, is selection bias when judging the usefulness of communicating with... the users of Steam?

Yes, selection bias. Loud people are easy to spot. Lurkers are hard to spot. A loud minority, therefore, can create the illusion of a larger mass of similar folk. Take, for example, the gamergate situation. There was just SO much toxic communication, it was a complete shitstorm, where many were attacked online in a horrible manner. So, gamers sure are a toxic bunch, right? Well, turns out, there are 1.5 billion gamer…

So what positive discussion comes of the people that aren't involved in discussions on Steam? None, it's still just a circus for Lurkers. If the reason to keep it open to Russia is communication, that is ONLY happening for those that are visible, not for the lurkers.

Re: Valve is paying open-source developers to work on Proton, Mesa, and more

#285

Post by npteljes » Wed, Dec 21, 2022, 9:55 AM UTC

ROTMetro wrote: post #284

npteljes wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, selection bias. Loud people are easy to spot. Lurkers are hard to spot. A loud minority, therefore, can create the illusion of a larger mass of similar folk. Take, for example, the gamergate situation. There was just SO much toxic communication, it was a complete shitstorm, where many were attacked online in a horrible manner. So, gamers sure are a toxic bunch, right? Well, turns out, there are 1.5 billion gamer…

So what positive discussion comes of the people that aren't involved in discussions on Steam? None, it's still just a circus for Lurkers. If the reason to keep it open to Russia is communication, that is ONLY happening for those that are visible, not for the lurkers.

Communication is not just the forums, I literally meant everything offered by Steam as part of the communication. The selection of games, the content and presentation of the games, the fact that people play together and communicate in game, either explicitly by voice or text, or indirectly by gameplay. It's all a communication not just of words, concepts, but the ways of living, the ways of relating to the everydays and the world. And that's very useful in not leaving people alone in their bubble, it broadens their perspective, makes them more open to new ideas, tolerate more strange things. How do we know that this works? It's everything that an oppressive regime (and abusive people) works against. Their goal is to isolate, so that they can control the narrative, so that they can solidify their power. So, to weaken their hold over people, you need ways in. Culture, like movies, music, novels, internet content. And like Steam.

Re: Valve is paying open-source developers to work on Proton, Mesa, and more

#286

Post by hnarn » Wed, Dec 21, 2022, 12:39 PM UTC

poulpy123 wrote: post #274

hnarn wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless we’re talking about embedded systems (and most of the time, not even then I’d guess for portable gaming devices for example), what is the actual drawback of these “huge” binaries? Wasn’t the reason to separate binaries and libraries in the first place to conserve disk space? They are then clearly versioned to signal that you can’t expect just any version of the library to work with the program you wrote. The t…

I just checked and I have 5600 binaries in my /usr/bin. They take an average of 100kb. If statically compiling them means an average of 50M that means 281gb.

You're arguing against a strawman saying that no binaries should ever be anything but statically compiled, including system binaries bundled with the operating system. I certainly did not say that.

Re: Valve is paying open-source developers to work on Proton, Mesa, and more

#287

Post by HereIGoAgain » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 6:03 AM UTC

ever1337 wrote: post #120

heywhatupboys wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah, even though I'd agree that KF is detestable I am very curious about this tbh. Has anyone here gone to that site? I read that they just report publicly available info that people have voluenteered online. While I understand that doxxing is terrible and so is targeted harassment, are they that much worse than the daily mail or any other gossip magazine?

the difference between KF and a tabloid is that KF members go out of their way to interfere in their targets' lives

No, they actually don't. That is against the rules to even talk about. You're thinking about /b/ or something from back in the day, or the people attacking the site.

Re: Valve is paying open-source developers to work on Proton, Mesa, and more

#288

Post by slavik81 » Sat, Dec 24, 2022, 9:49 AM UTC

slavik81 wrote: post #198

werlkyhrkj wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not sure why you added that "[the kernel amdgpu]" bit -- pretty sure that isn't what gp was saying. the open source kernel driver is the only one in use and sits under both the open source and closed source userland driver stacks. i'm pretty sure what they're saying is that rocm doesn't support running on the apu in the steam deck at all -- i'm dealing with a similar issue in bringing up a product on a different amd…

If so, that's more promising. The HIP runtime sits on the ROCm Runtime (ROCr), which sits on hsa-kmt (ROCt). I was under the impression that the driver handles pretty much all of the stuff that is hardware-specific. It's an RDNA2 GPU and AFAIK, all the RDNA2 GPUs can be coerced into working with ROCm (even if they are not 'supported'). Maybe the Steam Deck is an exception. I don't know. I'll give it a spin over the h…

I borrowed a friend's Steam Deck and created a Debian userland to check if there were any issues using the hardware for ROCm. As far as I can tell, the only reason ROCm doesn't work on the Steam Deck is that the necessary software has not been packaged for SteamOS yet.

When I check rocminfo, the hardware is reported as gfx1033, which is an identical instruction set to gfx1030, so export HSA_OVERRIDE_GFX_VERSION=10.3.0 should work perfectly if you're using the AMD binaries. Or you can build from source for gfx1033, but that's probably more painful than necessary.

The one catch is that the Steam Deck is currently using Linux 5.13, which predates a lot of bug fixes. I was noticing bugs while using the upstream kernel when packaging ROCm for Debian until something like Linux 5.19. My test case for the Steam Deck was rocRAND, which passed most of its tests. I would expect the rest to pass with a newer kernel, though I haven't verified that.

tl;dr: ROCm is not packaged for easy installation on all the platforms you might want to use it on, but it appears that the hardware works and the software exists.