Re: Linux in a binary world... a doomsday scenario

Arjan van de Ven
2005-12-07T07:04:08Z

On Wed, 2005-12-07 at 07:02 +0000, Luke-Jr wrote:
> On Tuesday 06 December 2005 14:49, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> > Sure. But that doesn't mean there is no purchase power. HP, Dell and IBM
> > and co DO have purchasing power over NVidia and ATI. If they tell ATI or
> > NVidia to either go open source (unlikely) or rearchitect their drivers
> > to do the "hot IP" in userspace, it will happen.
>
> Proprietary code in userspace is not much better.

Actually yes it is a lot better. Maybe it's not perfect, especially when
it talks to hardware, but in general userland code won't be able to
crash the machine, and is far less sensitive to internal changes to the
kernel. Userland applications are also independent works and are
isolated from eachother when they run. As long as you don't need them
for your system to boot.. Needing a userspace "driver" for 3D stuff is
a bit less optimal than the regular userland application, because it
voids some of the advantages I listed above, but it still is a heck of a
lot better than doing it in kernel land....