On 2021-06-04, Alessandro Pistocchi wrote:
> I have managed to create some exciting, gaming-specific extensions to
> the OpenBSD kernel, specifically for an arm64 raspberry pi 4.
>
> I would like to turn this into a product that people enjoy if possible
> and I would be happy to make something that benefits the OpenBSD
> community as well somehow. I am enjoying working on OpenBSD and am
> genuinely happy to give something back if I can.
>
> I started a discussion on other channels about this and got quite a
> bit of resistance, mainly because I wasn't planning to send diffs for
> what I am doing.
>
> My reasoning for not sending them is that the changes I made could
> create security issues for ordinary users, and I think that it would
> be a nightmare to maintain only to be able to play smoother games on a
> single platform, which in the grand scheme of things is quite small.
>
> To give you an idea, I am giving exclusive access to 3 out of 4 cpu
> cores to a game and I give the game quite a few pages of contiguous
> memory for the framebuffer. I give all that back to openbsd when the
> game ends. OpenBSD cannot interrupt the game on those 3 cores, it can
> only kill the game if needed. That's not stuff that should go into the
> official kernel, right?
Seems unlikely.
> What I was thinking was more like "I go on and try to make and sell my
> product and when I make money I donate a percentage of the profits to
> the OpenBSD Foundation".
>
> Is that acceptable? Or alternatively, what is the "right" way of doing
> something like that?
I don't think there's any issue with that. The license on the code is
deliberately non-restrictive. No requirement to make a donation but that
certainly would be a nice thing to do.
