Ubuntu Now Supports The Allwinner D1 Powered Nezha RISC-V Board

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu Now Supports The Allwinner D1 Powered Nezha RISC-V Board

Last week Canonical announced official Ubuntu RISC-V images for the StarFive VisionFive board while this week they are expanding their supported RISC-V line-up to also include the Nezha single board computer powered by the Allwinner D1 SoC...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-Nezha-RISC-V-SBC

[bezirg]

I think the upcoming Pine64 Start64 RISC-V sbc , sounds like a better deal if priced as expected. Its only downside would be its imgtec PowerVR gpu. I hope Imagination Technologies finally commits to open-source for good, instead of now and then. I remember from some years ago the nightmare for having linux graphics in my odroid xu+e SBC (powervr gpu).

[JacekJagosz]

Its only downside would be its imgtec PowerVR gpu. I hope Imagination Technologies finally commits to open-source for good, instead of now and then. I remember from some years ago the nightmare for having linux graphics in my odroid xu+e SBC (powervr gpu).

This is what Pine64 said about it:

The SoC has Imagination Technologies’ BXE-2-32 GPU for which the source code ought to be made available soon. Imagination Technologies have recently come through on their promise of open sourcing their other GPUs, so there is no reason to believe that it will be any different in the case of the BXE-2-32. Since the formal introduction of the board to the market is still a few months away, the code may very well be available on launch day.

I am a bit worried. Because Imagination never said that they will opensource their current drivers, probably because of all the licensing issues. The only opensource driver they have is their WIP Rogue Vulkan driver. So that I think is wrong in their article.
But also if that Vulkan driver will be ready, it should support their GPU, as Rogue architecture debuted in 2012, and has been used since, and their GPU has been released in 2020. So hopefully it will be supported.

[bezirg]

JacekJagosz the exact same thing happened with the Odroid XU+E . First ImaginationTechnologies released a closed-source driver for Android and then HardKernel said that ImaginationTechnologies will release a real linux driver. After months (or maybe more than a year) , a half-assed closed-source linux kernel driver was "released" by ImaginationTechnologies that only worked for an ancient linux kernel version. I hope history does not repeat in this case.

I would suggest to people not to buy the Pine64 Star64 unless ImaginationTechnologies releases an open-source driver at launch. In other words, don't buy it with the expectation that ImaginationTechnologies will deliver in the future on its promise, because this has not been the case in the past.

[JacekJagosz]

JacekJagosz the exact same thing happened with the Odroid XU+E . First ImaginationTechnologies released a closed-source driver for Android and then HardKernel said that ImaginationTechnologies will release a real linux driver. After months (or maybe more than a year) , a half-assed closed-source linux kernel driver was "released" by ImaginationTechnologies that only worked for an ancient linux kernel version. I hope history does not repeat in this case.

I would suggest to people not to buy the Pine64 Star64 unless ImaginationTechnologies releases an open-source driver at launch. In other words, don't buy it with the expectation that ImaginationTechnologies will deliver in the future on its promise, because this has not been the case in the past.

I know, I still own Nokia Booklet 3g, with infamous GMA 500 by PowerVR, that was broken on Windows, and almost impossible to make it work on Linux. I finally managed to make the propietary driver to work on Linux... 10 years after I bought the device. So yeah, I know.

[hajj_3]

pico rio is another risc-v sbc. Think they delayed it to add a gpu, not sure whether it is still in development or not.

[Ladis]

JacekJagosz the exact same thing happened with the Odroid XU+E . First ImaginationTechnologies released a closed-source driver for Android and then HardKernel said that ImaginationTechnologies will release a real linux driver. After months (or maybe more than a year) , a half-assed closed-source linux kernel driver was "released" by ImaginationTechnologies that only worked for an ancient linux kernel version. I hope history does not repeat in this case.

Linux developers are part of the problem. If the ABIs didn't break so often, the old driver would work fine (like on other OSes). And why the driver was old? Probably it was licensed to the OEM partners only for some time and then some time period expired and could be released to the public. Naturally nobody would pay rewriting it to the new Linux kernel, when the GPU was already old and probably its IP didn't sell much anymore.

[Volta]

Linux developers are part of the problem.

No, the out of tree driver is the problem.

[Ladis]

No, the out of tree driver is the problem.

But Linux developers are very picky what they allow to put in the tree. Even AMD took years to learn how to write accepted code.

[redgreen925]

But Linux developers are very picky what they allow to put in the tree. Even AMD took years to learn how to write accepted code.

Yeah that damn picky wanting good code to put into the kernel not just any garbage code that comes along, raises its ugly head once more....