Well, I consume more open source software that I will ever produce, so I am in a dept to the community. If it means working a bit more to make my contribution useful to others and fit it into the bigger whole, I will gladly do so.

Valve contributed to Linux before, so the fact that they don’t have any direct upstreaming plans right now indicates that something is causing friction.

I would avoid reading too much into it. They and their developers are still contributing on other stuff. Also when working together, there will always be some friction, in any public collaborative project ever.

Nothing of this is a burden, it is just part of being a good contributor that reads and follows the rules. Contributing is pretty easy, when you have read and are following the guides. If you haven’t already, you should give it a try.

I am pretty sure that this isn’t the first contribution of Valve to the Linux kernel. It sounds more to me like “works for me, don’t care about others” attitude. Which is not a good attitude to have when working in any collaborative project. (Not necessarily against the developers, could also be management.)

Well, it is about code quality. And the same codebase should work on different hardware, which is not something that is required in downstream forks.

But it is sad to see that the driver was submitted in the past, is still actively developed and improved, but there doesn’t seem to be plans of submitting them again.

Also I don’t think that a platform driver is so complicated that it requires such a long time for mainlineing. It not a filesystem or VPN.

On a more interesting topic, the SteamDeck platform drivers are still not merged into mainline Linux… :'(

Last news about it: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Deck-Platform-Driver-2024