> something that should not happen in any free software package.
Some people takes "free software" pretty wrong. Free software doesn't mean being fair to all hardwares. It only is fair to accepting contributions from people who want their machines to work with it. They would be individual contributors but they are mostly people from the hardware vendors.
That's being said, Linux/Free software have being supporting Intel very well because Intel itself is one of the biggest contributor. It's time for AMD to hire more software engineers to support better drivers and software ecosystem.
The code is bad, it should detect features not vendor names . the proper fix should be CC-ed to the Intel developer so he can learn the good way of doing it.
This kind of bad code makes sites to ask me to run a modern browser just because my modern browser is not in the dev whitelist or this kind of bad code caused Microsoft not to have Windows9 because some developers where clever and instead of checking for features or check for win95 and win98 they wrote a shorter line of code and checked for "Win9".
In conclusion there are 2 possibilities:
1 the Intel dev did a mistake
2 it was intentional to limit the improvements to Intel only
you are arguing that 2 is fine, then you are fine if google, Facebooks, Microsoft also put checks in their commits and limit features only if the code runs in their OS,browser,site. This kind of obvious user hostile commits are bad and don't have a place in free software and IMO the Intel compiler should not intentionally cripple a competitor.
Also this attitude would mean that each company should now have a developer dedicated to check competitors contributions to make sure no intentional bad commits are sneak in because in your opinion is fair to intentionally do it.
> then you are fine if google, Facebooks, Microsoft also put checks in their commits and limit features only if the code runs in their OS,browser,site
In my experience some FB features (notes, maybe video) refuse to work on Firefox on *BSD. I tell it to lie about my UA and say that it's linux, everything works.
This is like a piece of JavaScript parsing User-Agent and looking for "Chrome 72.4" to decide whether it wants to work or not, instead of of detecting features.
Features have feature flags, you shouldn't be doing comparison like "this is an Intel model X then it runs this" but it should be "this has feature X then it supports X" period
It's the same crap as the ICC compiler throwing the slower code at AMD even though it would support the features
It's the job of the maintainer of glibc, but I think we can legitimately ask questions of Intel's contribution since it's pretty sneaky and in bad faith
> something that should not happen in any free software package.
Some people takes "free software" pretty wrong. Free software doesn't mean being fair to all hardwares. It only is fair to accepting contributions from people who want their machines to work with it. They would be individual contributors but they are mostly people from the hardware vendors.
That's being said, Linux/Free software have being supporting Intel very well because Intel itself is one of the biggest contributor. It's time for AMD to hire more software engineers to support better drivers and software ecosystem.