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Comment by cogman10

10 months ago

> Given the narrow set of hardware they're aiming to support and that they're writing many of their own drivers _anyway_ (and so are not relying as much on the large # of existing linux drivers), that approach might be more viable.

They are relying heavily on mesa. I'd also assume that GNU stuff is also pretty essential.

Perhaps Android would be possible? It has a HAL that might be easier to work with than the raw linux kernel. The android devs have put in a lot of effort to make downstream driver development not painful. With android, they'd also still have GNU stuff available.

The big issue is non-linux will mean every single open source tool may have a compatibility problem. You also end up dumping a huge amount of capabilities (like running docker containers).

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cogman10

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kllrnohj  10 months ago

Android would still come with the kernel development caveats which is where Asahi is having the most trouble. Android's HALs help abstract the userspace portion of drivers, but if you need to be in kernel space you're still stuck dealing with Linux. You could stick to just doing forks of the LTS releases, but then you're choosing between less-frequent-but-bigger merge conflicts every couple years vs. small-but-constant merge conflicts continuously.

yjftsjthsd-h  10 months ago

> They are relying heavily on mesa

Isn't mesa portable? Or are there parts that are OS-specific?

> With android, they'd also still have GNU stuff available.

I don't follow; Android is a non-GNU Linux distro. Or do you mean that being on Linux makes GNU stuff easy? (But then, GNU runs happily on BSDs and other unix-likes)

  • yellowapple  10 months ago

    > Isn't mesa portable? Or are there parts that are OS-specific?

    Even the OS-specific parts are at least permissively-licensed. OpenBSD is about as religious about "all new code must be under an ISC-compatible license" as it gets, and even they pull in Linux DRM/Mesa code for hardware graphics acceleration: https://man.openbsd.org/drm.7

  • cogman10  10 months ago

    > Isn't mesa portable? Or are there parts that are OS-specific?

    IDK. I'm not familiar with mesa enough to know how portable it is. That said, I do know that it's primarily deployed on linux. An issue with portability is simply that when big projects like mesa are developed, non-linux environments are rarely developed (No clue, for example, if you can build mesa for BSD).

    > Or do you mean that being on Linux makes GNU stuff easy?

    Mostly this. I don't think, for example, those GNU tools will port over to redox. Building them targeting android is a snap.