Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Coming Soon: An Open-Source, Reverse-Engineered Mali GPU Driver

Posted by timothy on from the mali-pitchers dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Next month at FOSDEM there will be an announcement of a fully open-source and reverse-engineered ARM Mali graphics driver for Android / Linux. This driver, according to Phoronix, is said to support OpenGL ES and other functionality from reverse engineering the official ARM Linux driver. Will this mark a change for open-source graphics drivers on ARM, just as the Radeon did for x86 Linux?"

3 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. Re:propreitary by airlied · · Score: 5, Informative

    You haven't looked at 3D programming in 15 years then?

    Its just like a CPU, you build shader programs, and optimsing the shader programs requires compilers and writing good compilers is hard and costs lots of money.

    Also the other reason is patent infringement, they are all infringing on everyone, just like the rest of the mobile space, so they don't want to make it that easy to show off what they are doing.

    Though neither of these reasons are really valid but lawyers and crap engineers like to keep themselves looking good.

  2. This is good news by DarkOx · · Score: 3, Informative

    Thanks to this effort we are much closer to being able to run a traditional GNU/X.org userland on these devices if desired. Just work out the details of the radio hardware and it should be possible to roll your own mobile distro pretty soon without having to be hardware expert

    --
    Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
  3. Already partially open source? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    As far as I can tell, ARM already provides GPLv2 implementations for the 2D parts of the driver, so what's new here is the 3D stack.

    http://www.malideveloper.com/developer-resources/drivers/open-source-mali-gpus-linux-exadri2-and-x11-display-drivers.php