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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."

5 of 54 comments (clear)

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

    Linus made it happen!

  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 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.

  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 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.