i hear the armbian team cheering from all the way over here.
Open source Mali GPU drivers merged
11–20 of 104 posts
Re: Open source Mali GPU drivers merged
#12I don't know much about ARM SoC ecosystems for Linux, but am I correct if I take this as a direct ARM Mali version of Nouveau, or it's slightly different?
I'm very surprised that ARM, the company that should provide proper software references for its ecosystem, is not open source friendly.
Re: Open source Mali GPU drivers merged
#13The fact that ARM has not made their Mali drivers open source is a joke. There's no excuse, same for Nvidia.
Re: Open source Mali GPU drivers merged
#14What devices can be used with these drivers? The message says there's two drivers: "Lima covers the older t4xx and panfrost the newer 6xx/7xx series" My perception is that Mali GPUs were just in Android phones where running where it's generally not possible to run a vanilla kernel or the bootloader is locked. Any dev boards?
There's a Chromebook, the Asus C201 that will benefit from this. I'm currently running PrawnOS (Debian-based) on it. Wrote a bit about that on reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/bebm93/linux_on_asus...
Basically this DRM driver plus the companion Panfrost Gallium3D driver merged into mesa 19.1 will enable blob-free 3D graphics on the C201 and other devices that use this chipset.
Right now the DRM kernel driver does not support X11, so it'll be a few more releases before I can really take advantage of it. I have successfully installed it along with and run the kmscube demo outside of X. Pretty exciting development.
With Panfrost, every component of the C201 except the BCM4354 WiFi chip becomes libre. Cypress bought out a division of Broadcom and started releasing datasheets on a bunch of WiFi chips including the BCM4354, which they now tag as CYW4354. (PDF: https://www.cypress.com/file/298141/download)
Not sure if that makes it easier or any more realistic to get blob-free firmware for this chip. I can only hope.
Re: Open source Mali GPU drivers merged
#15What devices can be used with these drivers? The message says there's two drivers: "Lima covers the older t4xx and panfrost the newer 6xx/7xx series" My perception is that Mali GPUs were just in Android phones where running where it's generally not possible to run a vanilla kernel or the bootloader is locked. Any dev boards?
Zynq Ultrascale+, a family of hybrid CPU+FPGA SOC's uses Mali 400 in some models.
Re: Open source Mali GPU drivers merged
#16What devices can be used with these drivers? The message says there's two drivers: "Lima covers the older t4xx and panfrost the newer 6xx/7xx series" My perception is that Mali GPUs were just in Android phones where running where it's generally not possible to run a vanilla kernel or the bootloader is locked. Any dev boards?
I was just experimenting with the lima driver on a pinebook last week, it works pretty well!
Re: Open source Mali GPU drivers merged
#17What license? Are they, like the intel and radeon gpu drivers, importable into OpenBSD/FreeBSD?
Re: Open source Mali GPU drivers merged
#18The fact that ARM has not made their Mali drivers open source is a joke. There's no excuse, same for Nvidia.
What is their reasoning?
Re: Open source Mali GPU drivers merged
#19The fact that ARM has not made their Mali drivers open source is a joke. There's no excuse, same for Nvidia.
What is their reasoning?
I don't work for ARM Holdings, so I don't know.
However, my experience in the hardware industry leads me to believe it's something about an 'intellectual property' fetish and pearl-clutching when confronted with the idea of 'giving away code for free'.
Re: Open source Mali GPU drivers merged
#20The fact that ARM has not made their Mali drivers open source is a joke. There's no excuse, same for Nvidia.
It's arguable in the case of ARM/Mali but sadly, there is for NVidia.
Their driver are not merely to "communicate" with the hardware. The driver include a lot of hotfix and optimization, sometimes specific to one game/application. The driver give them a competitive advantage over their competitor. They will probably never released it for free.