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NVIDIA Open-Sources 3D Driver For Tegra SoCs

Posted by samzenpus on from the set-it-free dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Linux developers are now working on open-source 3D support for NVIDIA's Tegra in cooperation with NVIDIA and months after the company published open-source 2D driver code. There are early patches for the Linux kernel along with a Gallium3D driver. The Tegra Gallium3D driver isn't too far along yet but is enough to run Wayland with Weston."

14 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. Excellent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Linus made it happen!

  2. OUYA to benefit? by nclemenson · · Score: 2

    Will this benefit OUYA?

    --
    He who laughs lasts.
    1. Re:OUYA to benefit? by viperidaenz · · Score: 2

      I'm pretty sure NVidia already support Android with their existing drivers....

    2. Re:OUYA to benefit? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Backer units are already shipping. It's a little late to be crapping on it as vaporware.

    3. Re:OUYA to benefit? by Belial6 · · Score: 3, Informative

      You can't pick one up at Fry's, but Target seems confident enough that it isn't vapourware. http://www.target.com/s?searchTerm=ouya&category=0|All|matchallpartial|all+categories&lnk=snav_sbox_ouya

    4. Re:OUYA to benefit? by Microlith · · Score: 2

      Well, they're not glibc compatible. You can use them with Xorg and a standard GNU userspace via a wrapper like libhybris, which was developed for Mer and is being used by Ubuntu Mobile.

    5. Re:OUYA to benefit? by Gadget_Guy · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yeah, you let me know when I can walk down to Fry's and pick one up.
      Until then, vapourware.

      By that logic, it will always be vapourware because there isn't a Fry's within walking distance of me. On the other hand, you could look at the reports of the unit shipping to their backers, then see that they have a release date of April for pre-orders & June for the general public. Perhaps then you might realise that the world doesn't revolve around you. A product can be considered released without you personally being able to find one in a particular store.

      We are not talking about Sony or Microsoft, with huge manufacturing and distribution capacity. The difference with this console is that you heard about it at the stage where they would normally be talking to venture capitalists. There wasn't some premature announcement designed to stop people from buying competitor's products. There was never a suggestion that this was a product that was ready to ship, it was always spoken about being in the design stage. It does not deserve to have derogatory labels just because you are impatient.

    6. Re:OUYA to benefit? by Gadget_Guy · · Score: 2

      You bought into Idrema and Phantom too I bet.
      You're a fucking idiot if you think Ouya has even a small chance of surviving. This thing is dead before it's even hit the gates.

      No, I don't own any console and I have no intention of doing so. However, me saying that the Ouya isn't vapourware is completely unrelated to whether it will survive or not.

      And frankly, I don't know why you are taking this so personally?

  3. AMD news yesterday, NVidia today, that's great! by girlinatrainingbra · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So phoronix had the news yesterday about an open-source wrapper to AMD's concession to open-source "AMD Releases UVD Engine Source Code" for the kernel-level wrapper code, and today, NVidia open sources the 3-d driver for Tegra. That's progress. I use the Nvidia binary blob on my debian distro hardware, and the Nvidia blob with the knoppix live-boot system, as Nouveau does not work well enough on my hardware. I hope this will help Nouveau a lot.

    1. Re:AMD news yesterday, NVidia today, that's great! by citizenr · · Score: 3, Interesting

      How is a driver for Tegra (not even a unified shader architecture, something similar to Riva TNT2) going to help your desktop driver?

      --
      Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
    2. Re:AMD news yesterday, NVidia today, that's great! by girlinatrainingbra · · Score: 2

      oopsie. Sorry, I misread the Tegra SoC "system on a chip" thing and my brain interpreted it as GPU stream processing. But hey, more opensourcing of video drivers is good in general.

  4. Not open source, but open documentation by dutchwhizzman · · Score: 5, Informative

    What NVidia did was document a very small and specific part of the chipset. They previously opened documentation of 2D accelleration, now the 3D part. The part that accelerates media playback is still closed. Given the fact that this is a SoC that will most likely be used for media playback just as much as for gaming and it's not their own driver code they have released, I'd not consider this open sourcing. They are merely releasing part of the specifications so third parties can develop drivers. Yes, they are actively helping one company, but there is no actual working code available as open source yet. Not from the 3rd party company, nor from NVidia themselves.

    --
    I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
    1. Re:Not open source, but open documentation by Tough+Love · · Score: 2

      Hmm, could it be that AMD knew NVidia would announce this driver and slipped in the video announcement just ahead of it? As it stands, AMD still looks like the leader.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    2. Re:Not open source, but open documentation by div_2n · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If you want a full open source driver stack, then AMD is THE way to go. I know there's some effort to reverse engineer the NVIDIA closed drivers that's making progress, but there's actually paid AMD employees developing open drivers based on the opened specs for their platform. That's the good news.

      Here's the bad news. The progress on the AMD open drivers is sloooooooooow because the number of paid employees working on the drivers is very few and the number of volunteers is very few too.

      The silver lining is that as features get implemented, they move forward to new generations pretty nicely with the new Southern Island chipsets being an exception. The state of THOSE open drivers is an absolute mess considering devices with that chipset have been shipping for quite a while. Allegedly, that chipset will be the basis for new cards for a while, so as the support improves for the Southern Islands, new cards should benefit immediately.