Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Open source Mali GPU drivers merged

lkml.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 104 posts

Re: Open source Mali GPU drivers merged

#31

Post by q3k »

grw_ wrote: post #29
gugagore wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is their reasoning?

I forget where I read this, but I recall that due to patent situation it's practically impossible to build a GPU without infringing on some patent or another. By keeping drivers closed source it's possible to maintain deniability- if ARM released open source GPU drivers it would be trivial for rights-holders to look at the implementation and see what they can sue for. It's not impossible to do this with blob drivers,…

I don't buy this. See: AMD and Intel both have open source drivers.

Re: Open source Mali GPU drivers merged

#32

Post by maeln »

q3k wrote: post #21
maeln wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They could do the same thing AMD did, which is keep their game/application API optimizations secret within a proprietary userspace stack, but also make it work with the open source Mesa/Gallium3d stack. Leave the OpenGL/Vulkan software development part to software developers (or keep doing it yourself if you think it's that important), but at least tell us how to drive your hardware. Interestingly, amdgpu/Mesa perfor…

I whish they would go the same way that AMD did, but I doubt we will see it any time soon. The thing is, AMD/ATI lost the software war against NVidia for quite a while now. AMD didn't have much to lose by open-sourcing their driver. And the AMD proprietary driver on Linux where always a mess, whereas NVidia at least "work" (even though they just refuse to play well with the linux env...).

Now, with NVidia diving more and more into the ML / GPGPU market (which is less windows-focused), they might have more pressure to actually open-source their driver (or at least, finally make them actually integrated properly with Linux), at least for their server focused hardware. But I wouldn't bet on it any time soon.

Let's be honest, they have a dominant position on the market. And their driver, as awful as they are, work. I think a lot of things would have to change for them to have the incentive to open-source them. My only hope at this point is that, with the growing GPGPU market, they might finally start to see Linux not as a second-class citizen.

Re: Open source Mali GPU drivers merged

#33

Post by stefan_ »

q3k wrote: post #13

The fact that ARM has not made their Mali drivers open source is a joke. There's no excuse, same for Nvidia.

Strictly speaking the kernel drivers for the ARM Malis are all open-source and GPL licensed (they need to be, since their customers want to ship Linux to consumers).

They are also entirely useless without the userland software that is doing all the actual work. The kernel drivers are just glorified task and memory managers.

Re: Open source Mali GPU drivers merged

#34

Post by grw_ »

q3k wrote: post #31
grw_ wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I forget where I read this, but I recall that due to patent situation it's practically impossible to build a GPU without infringing on some patent or another. By keeping drivers closed source it's possible to maintain deniability- if ARM released open source GPU drivers it would be trivial for rights-holders to look at the implementation and see what they can sue for. It's not impossible to do this with blob drivers,…

I don't buy this. See: AMD and Intel both have open source drivers.

Maybe they are the aforementioned rights-holders :)

Re: Open source Mali GPU drivers merged

#35

Post by madez »

floatboth wrote: post #23
q3k wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

Often it's a mess of third party proprietary dependencies, code owned by subcontractors, etc. e.g. when AMD open sourced AMDVLK, they had to replace the proprietary compiler it was depending on with LLVM. That was an easy one. Many projects are much more deeply intertwined with proprietary crap.

Usually the code is not important, just the specification. Data sheets and explanations of how the hardware acts will do, they can keep their secret code.

Re: Open source Mali GPU drivers merged

#36

Post by Newtonip »

Jonnax wrote: post #2

What 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?

Search for Orange Pi, Banana Pi, Pine64 and FriendlyElec. These companies offer a wide range of $10-$30 dollar single board computers based on Allwinner or Rockchip SOCs (most of which include a Mali GPU).

You can run ARM based Linux distros on them (such as Armbian). Up to now, most people use the ARM proprietary blobs to get OpenGL ES acceleration working on those things.

Re: Open source Mali GPU drivers merged

#37

Post by SXX »

q3k wrote: post #21
maeln wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They could do the same thing AMD did, which is keep their game/application API optimizations secret within a proprietary userspace stack, but also make it work with the open source Mesa/Gallium3d stack. Leave the OpenGL/Vulkan software development part to software developers (or keep doing it yourself if you think it's that important), but at least tell us how to drive your hardware. Interestingly, amdgpu/Mesa perfor…

> I suspect at some point in the future AMD will abandon their 'pro' proprietary stack entirely after realizing they should stick to being a hardware business.

John Bridgman of AMD confirmed it's their plan like 5+ years ago. The only reason they ever maintained proprietary stack on Linux is workstation users who need certified OpenGL implementation for various proprietary software.

By now the only proprietary parts of "pro" stack are OpenGL implementation and shader compiler for Vulkan / OpenCL. Everything else in "pro" package is open source already. There is still legacy OpenCL implementation, but I guess ROCm will be used for everything soon.

Re: Open source Mali GPU drivers merged

#38

Post by Zardoz84 »

maeln wrote: post #32
q3k wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could do the same thing AMD did, which is keep their game/application API optimizations secret within a proprietary userspace stack, but also make it work with the open source Mesa/Gallium3d stack. Leave the OpenGL/Vulkan software development part to software developers (or keep doing it yourself if you think it's that important), but at least tell us how to drive your hardware. Interestingly, amdgpu/Mesa perfor…

I whish they would go the same way that AMD did, but I doubt we will see it any time soon. The thing is, AMD/ATI lost the software war against NVidia for quite a while now. AMD didn't have much to lose by open-sourcing their driver. And the AMD proprietary driver on Linux where always a mess, whereas NVidia at least "work" (even though they just refuse to play well with the linux env...). Now, with NVidia diving more…

The last time that I checked AMDGPU experience is far superior that NVIDIA proprietary drivers.

Re: Open source Mali GPU drivers merged

#39

Post by bravo22 »

q3k wrote: post #19
gugagore wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

As someone who has worked on a chip design team and had to deal with this stuff... one of the biggest reasons is patents -- software patents. They can't sue you if they can't see what you're doing. There are lots of dumb software patents out there. AMD did get hit with a couple of those, but we were able to beat them because the order of operation didn't exactly match the claims in the patent.

Re: Open source Mali GPU drivers merged

#40

Post by ynnn »

q3k wrote: post #13

The fact that ARM has not made their Mali drivers open source is a joke. There's no excuse, same for Nvidia.

There's basically no chance that the current proprietary drivers will ever end up upstream, so if ARM / nvidia drivers were open source they would be out of tree.

Given that the most frequently cited reason that these drivers should be open source is improved user experience (less breakage when the kernel changes, easier install), what would be the advantage of an out of tree open source driver?

Post reply on HN