What will AMD do with Windows Vulkan driver, didn't they use amdvlk there? There was some radv on Windows experiment, it would be cool if AMD would use that.
replies(1):
Per AMD
>Notably, AMD's closed-source Vulkan driver currently uses a different pipeline compiler, which is the major difference between AMD's open-source and closed-source Vulkan drivers.
Hardware vendors: Stop writing software. Instead write and publish hardware documentation sufficient for others to write the code. If you want to publish a reference implementation that's fine, but your assumption should be that its primary purpose is as a form of documentation for the people who are going to make a better one. Focus on making good hardware with good documentation.
Intel had great success for many years by doing that well and have recently stumbled not because the strategy doesn't work but because they stopped fulfilling the "make good hardware" part of it relative to TSMC.
So a lot of the complexity of what the hardware is doing gets relegated to firmware as that is easier to patch and, especially relevant for wifi hardware before the specs get finalized, extend/adapt later on.
The problem with that, in turn, is patents and trade secrets. What used to be hideable in the ASIC masks now is computer code that's more or less trivially disassemblable or to reverse engineer (see e.g. nouveau for older NVDA cards and Alyssa's work on Apple), and if you want true FOSS support, you sometimes can't fulfill other requirements at the same time (see the drama surrounding HDMI2/HDCP support for AMD on Linux).
And for anything RF you get the FCC that's going to throw rocks around on top of that. Since a few years, the unique combination of RF devices (wifi, bt, 4G/5G), antenna and OS side driver has to be certified. That's why you get Lenovo devices refusing to boot when you have a non-Lenovo USB network adapter attached at boot time or when you swap the Sierra Wireless modem with an identical modem from a Dell (that only has a different VID/PID), or why you need old, long outdated Lenovo/Dell/HP/... drivers for RF devices and the "official" manufacturer ones will not work without patching.
I would love a world in which everyone in the ecosystem were forced to provide interface documentation, datasheets, errata and ucode/firmware blobs with source for all their devices, but unfortunately, DRM, anti-cheat, anti-fraud and overeager RF regulatory authorities have a lot of influence over lawmakers, way more than FOSS advocates.