Live data from Hacker News

Open Source ARM userland

raspberrypi.org

11–20 of 61 posts

Re: Open Source ARM userland

#11
post #8

What does the "userland" subset encompass? What's left in closed source blobs?

AFAIK everything that runs on the ARM is now open source. The firmware of the GPU itself could still be a blob. That's very cool, I hope NVidia follows suit wishful thinking.

Re: Open Source ARM userland

#12
post #8

What does the "userland" subset encompass? What's left in closed source blobs?

AFAIK everything that runs on the ARM is now open source. The firmware of the GPU itself could still be a blob. That's very cool, I hope NVidia follows suit wishful thinking .

No, userland means that it runs in user space, as opposed to within the kernel. Firmware is another matter of course.

Re: Open Source ARM userland

#13
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK everything that runs on the ARM is now open source. The firmware of the GPU itself could still be a blob. That's very cool, I hope NVidia follows suit wishful thinking .

No, userland means that it runs in user space, as opposed to within the kernel. Firmware is another matter of course.

Yes, but all our kernel code was already open. Everything that runs on the ARM is now FOSS.

Re: Open Source ARM userland

#14
post #6

OK good, now the blob?

This is a pretty dumb request. What are you going to do with a chunk of bits for a processor for which you don't even have a toolchain. There is nothing more to open source other than what is already there.

Asking for 'the blob' is akin to asking for the firmware source to a hard disk. Even if you had it you could not do much with it.

Re: Open Source ARM userland

#16
I'm curious how much of the OpenGL stack lives on the GPU. Does anyone know how low- or high-level the interface to the Videocore is? (Yes, I could just dive into the official source code release and the unofficial reverse engineering project, but that would be an inefficient use of potentially hours, when someone in the know might be able to answer in minutes)

Re: Open Source ARM userland

#17

The raspberrypi looks better every day. The last major item on the to-do list appears to be the supply side.

Even the supply is getting better. They have been increasing the production rates and the delivery timings are getting shorter.

Re: Open Source ARM userland

#19
post #9

Wow, this is big. Embedded vendors are particularly precious about their GPU drivers. Hopefully this is the start of a trend.

Well maybe - http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTIxM...

From what I can see in the referenced talk, Samsung will still only provide binaries for the graphics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyYXh1V8ov8#t=30m40s

Post reply on HN