Unlike the tradition of my past few talks at Linux Plumbers or Kernel conferences, this time around in Lisboa I did not start out with a rant proposing to change everything. Instead I celebrated roughly 10 years of upstream graphics progress and finally achieving paradise. But that was all just prelude to a few bait-and-switches later fulfill expectations on what’s broken this time around in upstream, totally, and what needs to be fixed and changed, maybe.

The LPC video recording is now released, slides are uploaded. If neither of that is to your taste, read below the break for the written summary.

Mission Accomplished

10 or so years ago upstream graphics was essentially a proof of concept for the promised to come. Kernel display modeset just landed, finally bringing a somewhat modern display driver userspace API to linux. And GEM, the graphics execution manager landed, bringing proper GPU memory management and multi client rendering. Realistically a lot needed to be done still, from rendering drivers for all the various SoC, to an atomic display API that can expose all the features, not just what was needed to light up a linux desktop back in the days. And lots of work to improve the codebase and make it much easier and quicker to write drivers.

There’s obviously still a lot to do, but I think we’ve achieved that - for full details, check out my ELCE talk about everything great for upstream graphics.

Now despite all this justified celebrating, there is one sticking point still:

NVIDIA

The trouble with team green from an open source perspective - for them it’s a great boon - is that they own the GPU software stack in two crucial ways:

NVIDIA defines how desktop GL works. Not so relevant anymore, and at least the core profile is a solid spec and has fully open source test suite from Khronos by now. But the compatibility profile, which didn’t throw out all the legacy features from the GL1.x days in the 90s, does not have any of the interactions with all the new features specced out and covered with tests - NVIDIA’s binary driver is that standard, and that since roughly 20 years.

More relevant today is CUDA, not quite as long as desktop GL, but for a market that’s growing at a rather brisk pace. CUDA is the undisputed king of the general purpose GPU compute hill. Anything and everything that matters runs on top of it, often exclusively.

Together these create a huge software moat around the high margin hardware business. All an open stack would achieve is filling in that moat and inviting competition to eat the nice surplus. In other words, stupid to even attempt, vendor lock-in just pays too well.

Now of course the reverse engineered nouveau driver still exists. But if you have to pay for reverse engineering already, then you might as well go with someone else’s hardware, since you’re not going to get any of the CUDA/GL goodies.

And the business case for open source drivers indeed exists so much that even paying for reverse engineering a full stack is no problem. The result is a vibrant community of hardware vendors, customers, distros and consulting shops who pay the bills for all the open driver work that’s being done. And in userspace even “upstream first” works - releases happen quickly and often enough, with sufficiently smooth merge process that having a vendor tree is simply not needed. Plus customer’s willingness to upgrade if necessary, because it’s usually a well-contained component to enable new hardware support.

In short without a solid business case behind open graphics drivers, they’re just not going to happen, viz. NVIDIA.

Not Shipping Upstream

Unfortunately the business case for “upstream first” on the kernel side is completely broken. Not for open source, and not for any fundamental reasons, but simply because the kernel moves too slowly, is too big, drivers aren’t well contained enough and therefore customer will not or even can not upgrade. For some hardware upstreaming early enough is possible, but graphics simply moves too fast: By the time the upstreamed driver is actually in shipping distros, it’s already one hardware generation behind. And missing almost a year of tuning and performance improvements. Worse it’s not just new hardware, but also GL and Vulkan versions that won’t work on older kernels due to missing features, fragementing the ecosystem further.

This is entirely unlike the userspace side, where refactoring and code sharing in a cross-vendor shared upstream project actually pays off. Even in the short term.

There’s a lot of approaches trying to paper over this rift with the linux kernel:

Stable kernel ABI for driver modules, so that you can upgrade the core kernel and drivers independently. Google Android is very much aiming this solution at their huge vendor tree problem. Traditionally enterprise distros do the same. This works, safe that stable kernel-internal ABI is not a notion that’s very popular with kernel maintainers …

If you go with an “upstream first” approach to shipping graphics drivers you first need to polish your driver, refactor out common components, and push it to upstream. Only to then pay a second team to re-add all the crap so you can ship your driver on all the old kernels, where all the helpers and new common code don’t exist.

Pay your distro or OS vendor to just backport the new helpers before they even have landed in an upstream release. Which means instead of a backporting team for the driver on your payroll you now pay for backporting the entire subsystem - which in many cases is cheaper, but an even harder sell to beancounters. And sometimes not possible because other driver teams from competitors might not be on board and insist on not breaking the stable driver ABI for a given distro release kernel.

Also, there just isn’t a single LTS kernel. Even upstream has multiple, plus every distro has their own flavour, plus customers love to grow their own variety trees too. Often they’re not even coordinated on the same upstream release. Cheapest way to support this entire madness is to completely ignore upstream and just write your own subsystem. Or at least not use any of the helper libraries provided by kernel subsystems, completely defeating the supposed benefit of upstreaming code.

No matter the strategy, they all boil down to paying twice - if you want to upstream your code. And there’s no added return for the doubled bill. In conclusion, upstream first needs a business case, like the open source graphics stack in general. And that business case is very much real, except for upstreaming, it’s only real in userspace.

In the kernel, “upstream first” is a sham, at least for graphics drivers.

Thanks to Alex Deucher for reading and commenting on drafts of this text.