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Talk Of An ARM Vendor Open-Sourcing Their 3D Driver?

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  • Talk Of An ARM Vendor Open-Sourcing Their 3D Driver?

    Phoronix: Talk Of An ARM Vendor Open-Sourcing Their 3D Driver?

    While we have seen a number of ARM vendors in recent years open-source and mainline DRM/KMS drivers in the Linux kernel for supporting their display blocks on modern SoCs, there has been little activity in the open-source 3D space still for ARM SoCs...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    This would be awesome news!

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    • #3
      There is only one Company that its important for FOSS drivers, that is Mali. If they use Mesa and have FOSS Driver, all other follow after some time.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by Nille View Post
        There is only one Company that its important for FOSS drivers, that is Mali. If they use Mesa and have FOSS Driver, all other follow after some time.
        There are millions of devices out there equipped with Malis. It's a shame nobody can use their graphics. The norwegian company ARM bought must feel very proud of the crappy situation they made. It's amazing that they have like 500+ employees and not even a single leak. Don't they find it a bit odd that they sell thousands of RPi clones, tablets, set-top boxes and so on with their GPU IPs in them and without any kind of graphics support?

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        • #5
          Fingers crossed for ImgTek. Then GMA3600 hopefully will get working driver at least in 2017. (Just in case someone doesn't know about it - proprietary driver compatible only with Windows 8 x86 and Ubuntu 12.04 i386; latest Windows driver is unstable and buggy, in Windows 10 it crash system compositor.)

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          • #6
            This is one of those situations where everyone, including the company, would benefit from open source drivers. Linux is a huge marketshare to Mali-based chips and it could be exponentially larger if their drivers weren't complete crap. It makes no sense why they've been so negligent. There is certainly enough of a community out there to take the burden off their hands of maintaining the drivers.

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            • #7
              If mali was open sourced then we would see dirt cheap ubuntu netbooks being released with cheap arm SoC's. This would be helpful for cyanogenmod roms for android phones running mali gpus too.

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              • #8
                I really don't get why they don't open-source gpu drivers. It's not like the competition, with different hardware, will reuse code. If they own hardware architecture patents, the competition is automatically locked out. And if another company would try to reuse some code, well, lol, ever try to reuse code? It's always longer than starting from scratch.

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                • #9
                  Please let it be ARM / Mali. That would be wonderful. I actually have a device with that one here. PowerVR / ImgTec. will be of limited use since afaik their chips are modified even within a series for each vendor. Would be a good bunch of work. But ARM's own approach, yeah, that would be a nice start. Question still is - since ARM just licenses IP cores and stuff - how far actual HW implementers might have bent the matter.
                  Stop TCPA, stupid software patents and corrupt politicians!

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                  • #10
                    Mali would be a very interesting one, since it is also found in some INTEL chips....

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