Freedreno DRM/Gallium3D Shines Well For ARM

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Freedreno DRM/Gallium3D Shines Well For ARM

The reverse-engineered Freedreno driver for open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics support is quickly taking shape as the leading ARM Linux graphics driver for the (non-Android) Linux desktop...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTQyNDU

[oliver]

Amazing. Just amazing. These arm drivers (freedreno/lima) drivers are going so fast its awesome.

[M1kkko]

Android still supported?

I was wondering if it would be possible to use this driver on Android as a replacement of the vendor's proprietary blob?

[robclark]

btw, just to clarify.. the qcom kgsl/gpu driver isn't *horrible*.. it isn't really providing what userspace needs for dri2/synchronization/etc. But, it doesn't make me want to claw my eyes out. In the non-upstream-vendor-gpu-driver category, I've seen *much* worse. The fbdev display driver, however, is coming from a different team. And that driver really just needs to be taken out back and shot.

[shmerl]

The problem is, that real devices (such as new Nexus 7) have many other drivers which are needed (for example a touchscreen driver). So having Freedreno is great, but might be not enough to create a fully functional hardware adaptation for a glibc mobile distro (KDE/Plasma Active, Nemo Mobile and etc.).

Other than that, I'm really waiting to see Wayland based mobile distros running without libhybris with native drivers.

[droidhacker]

The problem is, that real devices (such as new Nexus 7) have many other drivers which are needed (for example a touchscreen driver). So having Freedreno is great, but might be not enough to create a fully functional hardware adaptation for a glibc mobile distro (KDE/Plasma Active, Nemo Mobile and etc.).

Other than that, I'm really waiting to see Wayland based mobile distros running without libhybris with native drivers.

Touchscreen drivers are not generally a big deal. Most are open source.
Also, I would caution you against assumptions about the "realness" of devices. IFC6410 is just as real as nexus 7, and actually a whole lot more USEFUL.

[shmerl]

Realness here meaning consumer ready (hardware wise). Not the one intended for specifically developers and system builders. Of course all of them are real, but intended audience is different. What can be useful for some, is not usable for others.

[shmerl]

Touchscreen drivers are not generally a big deal. Most are open source.

So do you expect this new Nexus 7 to run Plasma Active on Wayland in the future without libhybris? There are other drivers involved (wifi, camera, etc. etc.). And bionic-only problem can affect them all (or any part of them).

[robclark]

So do you expect this new Nexus 7 to run Plasma Active on Wayland in the future without libhybris? There are other drivers involved (wifi, camera, etc. etc.). And bionic-only problem can affect them all (or any part of them).

Most of those (including touchscreen) are kernel-only, so no bionic vs glibc dependency.

They may or may not need some work, depending on what "desktop" (in quotes) environment you are running, and the quality of the original driver from the device's android kernel branch.. if you look on my nexus4/mako kernel branch, you'll notice a small patch from one of the RH input driver guys to add support to the touchscreen driver for mouse emulation (needed for gnome-shell). You might run into little things like this.

But generally graphics drivers are the biggest obstical for running something other than android, due to the fact that it is a large complex driver with components in kernel and in userspace.

[shmerl]

That would be great if other drivers won't be major blockers. GPU one is indeed the worst case.