Loongson Extending Etnaviv Driver For PCI Device Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Loongson Extending Etnaviv Driver For PCI Device Support

Chinese hardware vendor Loongson is working on extending the open-source, reverse-engineered Etnaviv Linux kernel graphics driver so it has PCI device support and in turn will work with their hardware based on the Vivante graphics IP...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Loongson-Etnaviv-PCI-Driver

[uid313]

How stupid, they should just ditch Loongson and adopt RISC-V instead.

[SteamPunker]

Interesting. Does this mean that someone could produce a discrete PCIe graphics card with a Vivante GC1000 graphics core? It might not win any awards in terms of performance, but it could be a very cheap and low-power GPU with increasingly solid open-source driver support, which might make it an existing option in quite a few use cases.

[Vistaus]

How stupid, they should just ditch Loongson and adopt RISC-V instead.

I'm sure that's what they said when RISC-V was announced: “How stupid, they should just ditch RISC-V and adopt ARM or x64 instead.”.

Who knows, maybe Loongson will be as good as RISC-V in most areas.

[Inopia]

It's always great to see the first party compnay swiching effort over to the reverse engineered driver.

[tuxd3v]

I am waiting for the next loongson silicon release..it seems it will be great.
In relation to etnaviv, its awesome that some one is upgrading its driver for efficiency and features support.

[andrei_me]

Etnaviv reminds me of Librem 5, any news on that Michael?

[pierce]

I'm keen to see the same treatment for RISC-V, so I can actually use my c910 board without binary blobs!

But really, the Etnaviv driver is in a bit of a sad state without anyone really supporting it. Is it abandoned?

Vivante really is the only other GPU that is supported on RISC-V SoCs, as, well, y'know, Mali is Arm's.

[Dawn]

I'm keen to see the same treatment for RISC-V, so I can actually use my c910 board without binary blobs!

But really, the Etnaviv driver is in a bit of a sad state without anyone really supporting it. Is it abandoned?

Vivante really is the only other GPU that is supported on RISC-V SoCs, as, well, y'know, Mali is Arm's.

There have been Mali GPUs in non-ARM types (MIPS [Alchemy], x86 [SofIA], and ST40/SH4 [STMicro STiH.]) Unless something has changed, ARM does not care about the ISA of the apps core you plug the Mali into.

Imgtec's PowerVR also exists, and is in use in some RISC-V devices. I'd guess PowerVR core volume is many times higher than Vivante.

[phoron]

Interesting. Does this mean that someone could produce a discrete PCIe graphics card with a Vivante GC1000 graphics core? It might not win any awards in terms of performance, but it could be a very cheap and low-power GPU with increasingly solid open-source driver support, which might make it an existing option in quite a few use cases.

How do you mean "existing" ? I'm not aware that such an interesting card exists yet. It could indeed solve some cases.