Comment by zozbot234
6 days ago
The Asahi and pmOS folks have been quite successful in upstreaming drivers to the kernel (even for non-trivial devices like GPU's) as enthusiast contributors with no real company backing. The whole effort on including Rust in the Linux kernel is largely about making it even easier to write future drivers.
Agreed, and I'm fairly impressed by the GPU effort. That said, it did take a very long time, even with the demonstrably extreme amount of excitement from the Linux community (Linus himself was thrilled to use a Macbook). What do you do for parts that are useful but don't get people this excited?
What really burned me on this kind of stuff was the disappearance of Xeon Phi drivers from the kernel. Intel backed it out after they discontinued the product line, and the kernel people gladly went with it ("who'll maintain this?"). Intel pulled a beautiful piece of process lawyership on it: apparently they could back it out without difficulty, because the product was never released! (Never mind it has been sold, retired and circulated in public.)
> What really burned me on this kind of stuff was the disappearance of Xeon Phi drivers from the kernel
If you depend on that hardware, you can get it to be supported again. It just doesn't seem to be all that popular.
Note that the Rust effort is mostly sponsored by Google and Microsoft, thus the 9-5 example of the OP.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure the Asahi GPU driver has not been upstreamed.