Qualcomm Makes Open-Source 3D Snapdragon Driver

An anonymous reader writes "Qualcomm today posted the source code to a Linux kernel driver for 2D/3D support on its OpenGL ES Core found on Snapdragon-based phones like the Nexus One. The company is trying to get this driver into the mainline Linux kernel, but it turns out that the user-space driver is still not open source, which has resulted in some problems already. The ongoing discussion can be found on FreeDesktop.org."

Comments

Re:This is the great thing about Android.

[Svartalf]

The driver stack for the FOSS side is just now beginning to learn how to crawl properly- something you need to do before you can walk or run.

Previously, we'd reverse engineered the stuff. Based on what I've learned doing work for one of the Big Two (that'd be AMD or NVidia...), they're barking up the right tree, doing things in the large the same way they do things within the driver. When the community gets to those first few stumbling steps instead of crawling around, the speed of development will increase- and AMD's stuff will suddenly become quite valuable to anyone on Linux or other FOSS OS.

Like we've been told before in the past- doing 3D drivers isn't exactly an easy thing to do. It takes some time before you can get to the same level of support we see with the proprietary drivers from NVidia and AMD. Unfortunately, you either have to choose pretty robust drivers, slightly less robust/speedy hardware, coupled with closed drivers- or choose much more unstable drivers (some people have GREAT results with AMD's stuff, I've got decent results with some issues in my case- but some have pure HELL with the drivers in question...) and the promise of 6-12 months down the line having 60% of the peak performance with an open source driver, coupled with the promise of seeing as much as 85% of the peak performance or more in another 12-24.

Many will choose the shiny solution that works right now. Some don't need and can't afford to fidget with the hardware to make it work and will buy something for business that will work right now (AMD's stuff is less robust in the laptop space until recently- which translated into an NVidia purchase on my i7 laptop I'd bought a while back.

If AMD's closed source solution was a full-on winner (it's not...) there'd be a lot less people buying NVidia right now because they opened up and it's coming together for everyone on that space, albeit slowly.