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Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?

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Re: Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?

#171

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

the_biot wrote: post #64

> being forced to make drivers that work equally in linux, windows and even macOS That is almost a recipe for drivers built on hardware abstraction layers (HALs), so vendors can use literally the same code on every platform. That, of course, results in a bunch of unnecessary HAL code being added -- unnecessary from the OS point of view, which already has perfectly good hooks for all the stuff a driver needs. That's t…

> What often happens on Linux is vendors will then move their HAL and drivers into userspace, interfacing with the kernel via a shim instead. This has the side effect of no longer needing to open-source the driver code at all, since it's not linked into the kernel. Look how that works out!

It doesn't stop anyone else from writing better drivers (i.e. the thing they already do) but decouples things so that people can at least update their kernel while keeping their drivers. So, win-win.

Re: Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?

#172

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #3

Drivers… I don’t know if I could sign on for that for the following reasons: 1. The burden it would put on smaller manufacturers and companies (every little regulation adds up), especially difficult considering the comparative lack of qualified developers 2. Drivers != Quality, Upstreamable Drivers. Making the judgements of Linux maintainers legally binding is a bad idea. Case in point: Apple has Linux drivers intern…

> 3. If we can force companies to support Linux, why not force all websites to support Firefox? Why not force all desktop programs like Adobe to support Linux? Etc…

...Although I agree that there are questions about required effort and breadth of support and burden to smaller companies, every one of those sound like wonderful outcomes to me.

Re: Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?

#173

Post by crote »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #93
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd have to define "hardware" in a rather interesting way for that to have any hope of working. Consider any sort of user-facing device (say, an electronic toy, or a music performance device, or for that matter, even a phone). These are all aggregates of hardware made by other companies. Yet they are also hardware. Being unable to develop such devices along with the firmware that runs them would make it more or les…

Let's say one wants to make hardware made of 3 pieces of hardware that talk to each other. They may need to write firmware to do that. At a first approximation, I would say one of the following should apply: Either the firmware can be modified by the user, or remotely, in which case it should not be shipped. Or it is an implementation detail of the communication between the 3 pieces of hardware, not reasonably modifi…

But it is often both. Just because it is essential for proper operation and therefore an implementation detail, doesn't mean it cannot be updated.

Even a device as trivial as a keyboard, mouse, or SSD drive has firmware which can be updated. Shipping them without firmware would be completely ludicrous, and you'd basically buy a fancy brick. Hell, you need to flash firmware onto it in the factory to make future updates by the user possible!

Re: Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?

#174

Post by mschuster91 »

scarface_74 wrote: post #159
nani8ot wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has an interest in keeping their devices alive, since they can make money of the store and services. Android manufactures want you to throw the phone away and buy a new one. Since manufacturers didn't demand long support, Qualcomm didn't provide updates for their SoCs. This meant Fairphone couldn't support their phones even if they wanted to, which is why they used am automotive chip in their new phone — which…

> Apple has an interest in keeping their devices alive, since they can make money of the store and services Isn’t that the free market working the way it should without government interference?

The problem with an unregulated free market is that eventually one or two companies get so dominant that it is virtually impossible to challenge them as a competition, especially in fields that require immense amounts of money to break into. One might even argue that the end game of capitalism is to acquire a monopoly, which one can then use to extract rents as one feels free to do, or just keep milking locked-in customers (like IBM and Oracle are).

It took Apple, flush with cash from iPhones and iPods, a decade worth of work to create a SoC able to throw punches at eye level with Intel and AMD, which themselves grew to the unholy duopoly over decades. Chipmakers have it even worse: TSMC has all the cards, Samsung and Intel have completely fallen behind with no chance in sight that they'll match TSMC any time soon. All the other competition has gone bankrupt or stopped at lesser nodes because they couldn't keep up the pace.

There's no disrupting that, not even if you are an actual nation state.

Re: Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?

#175

Post by scarface_74 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #168
scarface_74 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it’s a dumb idealistic idea that never worked in practice. Geeks spent forever trying to get crappy drivers working IRQ conflicts fixed, etc. It wasn’t until Windows 95 and WinHec and “Plug and Play” that x86 based PCs became usable for the mass market

Maybe, but that's a separate matter from publishing specs that would let someone write a driver.

How well did that work in the past when for profit companies had a motivation to write good drivers? You think it’s going to be a seamless mass market experience this time?

Re: Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?

#176

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

scarface_74 wrote: post #175
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but that's a separate matter from publishing specs that would let someone write a driver.

How well did that work in the past when for profit companies had a motivation to write good drivers? You think it’s going to be a seamless mass market experience this time ?

I don't see the connection. Two things appear to be true: 1. In the past, it was common to publish actual specs for talking to hardware. 2. In the past, drivers often sucked. You appear to be claiming that the first thing caused the second, but I can't see any reason for that to follow. It's not like hardware manufacturers couldn't, or indeed didn't, write their own official drivers, and on the other hand there's no reason to believe that a 3rd-party driver written using proper hardware docs wouldn't work well. In fact, it's quite reasonable to suggest that the improvement in quality is entirely tied to overall architecture improvements, mostly (as cousin comments point out) device enumeration standards and possibly OS improvements (preemptive multitasking and memory protection).

Re: Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?

#177

Post by Vilian »

nextos wrote: post #37
TacticalCoder wrote: post #32

> Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux? > Why are these companies like intel, Razer, nvidia or AMD.. The question makes no sense. As one of the Reddit comment says: Intel and AMD are among the biggest contributors to the Linux kernel. The real-world is pretty much powered by millions of Linux machines running on Intel or AMD hardware (for the most part). Try replacing that with Wind…

What could work well is forcing manufacturers to release hardware documentation that is sufficiently detailed to allow developing drivers without reverse engineering. Perhaps forcing them to do so a couple of years after hardware release, so that it does not interfere too much with trade secrets. This would avoid perfectly functional hardware to go to the landfill because of no further software support, and it would…

what about releasing the source code of drivers/firmware after the official support ended

Re: Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?

#178

Post by vetinari »

scarface_74 wrote: post #162
smoldesu wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Multipoint connection has been a part of the Bluetooth spec since 4.0. Compatible devices will connect to anything available nearby and negotiate audio to whichever device pressed 'play' last. No iCloud mumbo-jumbo required, it was smoother than the Airpods experience when I was using it.

And how many “multipoint” devices support an unlimited number of devices? I currently have 2 AppleTVs, a MacBook, iPad, an iPhone and an Apple Watch all paired to my AirPods . What’s the pairing process like? Mine is just - sign into iCloud and my AirPods show up.

I have JBL headphones currently paired with Samsung phone, tablet, Intel NUC running Ubuntu and MacBook Pro running macOS. No problem, no cloud login necessary.

Re: Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?

#179

Post by vetinari »

scarface_74 wrote: post #122
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How will it make my everyday experience better as an Apple customer without the integration Perhaps you should ask the inverse - how good would your experience with Apple be, if there were no open standards paid for by someone else, and fought for by someone else? You wouldn't even have GPS and navigation. You would not have HTML or the open web. Before we fought for video codecs compatibility you could not even ge…

I think you should look up the history of h.264 and see who is in the patent pool…

You should go even further and check the video playback experience on apple machines, when divx was all the rage and apple had just a sorrenson video 3. And yeah, full-screen playback was a qt pro feature, paid extra.

Re: Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?

#180

Post by scarface_74 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #174
scarface_74 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple has an interest in keeping their devices alive, since they can make money of the store and services Isn’t that the free market working the way it should without government interference?

The problem with an unregulated free market is that eventually one or two companies get so dominant that it is virtually impossible to challenge them as a competition, especially in fields that require immense amounts of money to break into. One might even argue that the end game of capitalism is to acquire a monopoly, which one can then use to extract rents as one feels free to do, or just keep milking locked-in cus…

So guess what happened when the EU forced browser choice in Windows? It had no long term affect on the market share.

Geeks just always hate when normal people make their own choices using their own free will.

Every failure that you cited were well funded companies who failed to execute. Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft failed trying to introduce phones.

The market worked as it should - poor execution led to failure.

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