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

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?"

Comments

Re:It's a big challenge to reverse engineer

[TheRaven64]

Add to that, most modern GPUs also have a variety of coprocessors for things like H.264 decoding. These are quite often licensed as IP cores from a third party, so a company like nVidia or AMD may not even legally be allowed to provide you with their programming interfaces. To make life even more fun for reverse engineers, they don't document where they licensed these coprocessor cores from anywhere, so it's generally very hard to work out who to contact with a request for documentation. This is why open source drivers tend to miss off some of the features of the proprietary ones: once you've reverse engineered the GPU, there's still a load of other stuff left...