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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • As far as I was aware AMDGPU is used by default on most if not all distros

    I really don’t think that’s the case, assuming you’re talking about AMDVLK (amdgpu is the kernel module used by all three Vulkan drivers - RADV, AMDVLK and the Vulkan driver from AMDGPU-PRO). Ubuntu and Fedora definitely default to RADV, and Arch Wiki recommends RADV unless you need something from the other drivers.

    I noticed a performance increase after forcing RADV on NixOS so not really sure.

    NixOS seems to default to RADV according to their Wiki. If this was a few years ago then maybe you might be confusing it with the ACO shader compiler for RADV? That brought a significant performance increase and eventually became the default in RADV. I remember using custom Mesa (the project that develops open source graphics drivers, like RADV and radeonsi) builds to massively reduce stuttering in DirectX games.


  • I personally chose RADV after looking into this myself and the only drawback from my understanding is that they are proprietary drivers.

    RADV is the open-source community developed Vulkan driver. It has the widest hardware support of the three Vulkan drivers and is generally the best for gaming.

    AMD provides two more Vulkan drivers - AMDVLK is the open-source one available in AMDGPU, then there’s the unnamed proprietary Vulkan driver in AMDGPU-PRO. The biggest advantage of the proprietary one is that it is certified - doesn’t matter most of the time, but when it does, a missing certification is a deal breaker.






  • Don’t know about the rest, but…

    Does reflashing a ROM fix it?

    The phones appear to be simply dead with no response to anything. No way to connect ADB, no way to connect fastboot, nothing.

    Also the bootloader allows flashing over the cable only when it’s unlocked (at least on Pixels; I couldn’t find anything relevant in the Android documentation). The vast majority of Pixels should have their bootloaders locked, and it is only possible to unlock it through the system settings, so it’s pretty safe to say that most Pixels cannot be recovered if Android fails to boot because you cannot unlock the bootloader if you can’t get into settings.


  • That depends a lot on how the license gets interpreted and how license violations are handled by the local law. The argument for why the end user cannot do anything about GPL violation is that the violated contract is between upstream and the “bad” developer - the upstream project gave the bad developer access to their source code under the condition that the license stays the same. You as the end user only get exposed to the bad developer’s license, so you can’t do anything. It’s the upstream who must force them to extend a proper license to you.

    However there was also a case recently where the FSF argued that this interpretation / handling of the situation is against the spirit of GPL and I think they won, so… Yeah, it’s just unclear. Which is normal for legal texts (IMHO intentionally, but I’m not here to rag on lawyers, so I’ll leave it at that).


  • While I agree with your view (at least when it comes to firmware, especially given that hardware that doesn’t require a firmware upload on boot generally just has the very same proprietary firmware on a built-in memory, so the only difference is that you don’t get to even touch the software running on it), the point of this project is to remove non-libre components from coreboot/libreboot.

    It doesn’t differentiate itself from upstream in any other way, so if it fails to do the one thing it was made to do, then that’s in fact a newsworthy fact.


  • To be fair, giving a company that’s been failing to get themed icons to work on Android for almost four years now less than a month to make a significant change to a core part of their software is… quite weird?

    Like, the EU usually gives companies at least half a year to comply with smaller demands than this, because companies with such a huge bureaucracy load wouldn’t even be able to change an app logo in such a short amount of time.