Open source Mali GPU drivers merged • Hacker News Board

Re: Open source Mali GPU drivers merged

#101

Post by megous » Wed, May 15, 2019, 12:49 PM UTC

imtringued wrote: post #97

megous wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many more '* Pi' boards than just Raspberry Pi. A lot (most) of them have ARM GPU.

Yeah and they were useless because they didn't have GPU drivers. Now the situation has reversed and the Raspberry Pi is now the board that is most dependent on proprietary software.

Actually not true, even without GPU support all the ones I have (4 different SoCs - H3,H5,H6,A83T) are noticeably faster than Rpi 2 for things like browsing the web. (H5/H6 a bit unfair, since it's A53 CPU)

And desktop use is not the only thing you can do with these boards, and pretty much any of them is better than Rpi on connectivity, which is what matters for other use cases.

Re: Open source Mali GPU drivers merged

#102

Post by megous » Wed, May 15, 2019, 12:56 PM UTC

CameronNemo wrote: post #92

megous wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many more '* Pi' boards than just Raspberry Pi. A lot (most) of them have ARM GPU.

Frankly I am surprised they have not been hit with a trademark dispute.

On what basis? Raspberry Pi is a trademark only in combination of these words, no?

https://www.raspberrypi.org/trademark-rules/

And competition is good.

Re: Open source Mali GPU drivers merged

#103

Post by megous » Wed, May 15, 2019, 12:57 PM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #89

megous wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they accounted for mainlining from the start and not just as an afterthought, they would not have this issue.

A lot of the drivers are older than their Linux port, which makes mainlining from the start not really make sense. Nvidia and PowerVR I know for a fact are in that category.

Sure, that makes sense.

Re: Open source Mali GPU drivers merged

#104

Post by simcop2387 » Wed, May 15, 2019, 6:05 PM UTC

megous wrote: post #102

CameronNemo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly I am surprised they have not been hit with a trademark dispute.

On what basis? Raspberry Pi is a trademark only in combination of these words, no? https://www.raspberrypi.org/trademark-rules/ And competition is good.

Competition is definitely good. But the trademark issue is much more complicated than just the exact words/phrasing. It could be argued that they're using $FRUIT Pi to appear to be associated with the original Raspberry Pi (and I'd say that argument is correct, there's very little other reason to pick that same naming scheme). That doesn't mean that it's certainly a trademark infringement issue either though. In the US at least (no idea about the UK where the RPi is from), there's also a requirement that they're trying to confuse the market at the same time, which isn't so obvious.

Trademarks are complicated things mostly created by lawyers who have spent centuries building through loopholes and attempting to fix them. I'd say they serve a real useful purpose and are relatively well balanced against the interests of the populous (once you stop using one, you usually lose it). But they're by no means simple.