An Open-Source, Reverse-Engineered Mali GPU Driver

Luc Verhaegen does applaud the ARM Mali GPU design as being "clean" since their driver doesn't require any micro-code to be loaded manually nor does it do any register banging from user-space. This does help in the reverse-engineering process.

Even where this project is at now, it's still far ahead of the Free Software Foundation's high priority project of reverse-engineering the PowerVR driver, which has no effectively progress or working code, like many of the vaporous high-priority FSF efforts. It was over some beers in Nürnberg in H1'2011 that I first heard of Luc's Mali reverse-engineering ambitions, but the code has really come together in the past few months at the end of the year and into January.

Prost to more open-source Linux graphics! (Myself, Novell X.Org engineer Egbert Eich, and Luc Verhaegen tasting Scheiße American beer at XDC2011.)

More details will be shared on Phoronix (and via my Twitter feed) during the FOSDEM event in early February (4th and 5th of February) with also live coverage of the other interesting highlights from Brussels, Belgium. There will also be other interesting Wayland and X.Org talks from the event.