Has The Sky Fallen? Qualcomm Contributes To Freedreno's DRM/KMS Driver

[TheBlackCat]

starting or staring

I hope the latter.

[valeriodean]

Well in this case i think freedreno is beyond the blob driver, Qualcomm and imagination without any doubt, hands down produce the worst drivers in whole embedded ARM industry and even on android are barely borderline usable but freedreno is actually very nice to use and is quite stable and actually is quite compliant already.

I guess someone in Qualcomm say hey this guy actually knows how to write good drivers, lets help him

Sorry, It's not acceptable.
I can't - can't - believe that a company with the money of Qualcomm is not able to find one (yeah, Rob Clark is ONE dev not a team, ONE!) or more devs capable to write a fuc*ing driver! Come on! There are really full of incapable developers? Bah...
And, in case the previous is not enough, the Qualcomm devs have all the documentation available, in contrast to the only one Rob available option: reverse engineering.
Such a bunch of idiots...

Ok, forgot the sentence above.
That description can be applied perfectly also to my company: myopic people on top, incapable people all around.

[andreano]

Weather forecast for Hell

Nah, hell just froze over.

I was there last weekend. No snow yet, but I'm sure there will be. Still kinda rainy for the season though.

Weather forecast for Hell, Norway

[robclark]

Sorry, It's not acceptable.
I can't - can't - believe that a company with the money of Qualcomm is not able to find one (yeah, Rob Clark is ONE dev not a team, ONE!) or more devs capable to write a fuc*ing driver! Come on! There are really full of incapable developers? Bah...
And, in case the previous is not enough, the Qualcomm devs have all the documentation available, in contrast to the only one Rob available option: reverse engineering.
Such a bunch of idiots...

Ok, forgot the sentence above.
That description can be applied perfectly also to my company: myopic people on top, incapable people all around.

To be a bit fair, the blob driver does have more features.. and I benefit a lot from mesa/gallium ;-)

[mcirsta]

working in a company is less efficient

As a guy who works in a company I can clearly say that large teams of developers in a company are not always the most efficient. Sometimes there's various reasons you decide to make hacks, to not get things done properly and such. Probably one of the most important things are deadlines and restrictions imposed by what external software you can use.

Rob has the advantage that he's doing it our of pure passion and for fun. He's also got no deadlines and can use a bunch of free software to help. Probably not having a boss telling him what to do helps too.

Not saying this to make excuses for Qualcomm or minimize Rob's achievement. Also don't forget that finding talented people with such specific knowledge isn't the easiest thing. Getting them to work on your close source thingy is probably not that easy either.

Anyway thanks Rob for you work, hope to be able to use it soon and thanks Qualcomm for taking the first step, it's usually the hardest one to take.

[andreano]

To be a bit fair, the blob driver does have more features.. and I benefit a lot from mesa/gallium ;-)

Still, they should have done what you did in the first place. You have done them a huge favor. I'm glad they are beginning to realize that now.

Same story with Nouveau, and probably many more. Ref myopic people on top:
Companies are too worried about trade secrets for their own good!

[Ancurio]

To be a bit fair, the blob driver does have more features.. and I benefit a lot from mesa/gallium ;-)

By the way Rob, does Red Hat allow you to hack on freedreno at work, or is this still a past time endeavor of yours?

[liam]

Well in this case i think freedreno is beyond the blob driver, Qualcomm and imagination without any doubt, hands down produce the worst drivers in whole embedded ARM industry and even on android are barely borderline usable but freedreno is actually very nice to use and is quite stable and actually is quite compliant already.

I guess someone in Qualcomm say hey this guy actually knows how to write good drivers, lets help him

I agree about Qualcomm (seriously, look at their driver overhead performance), but IMG seemingly makes amazing drivers. Best in the industry (including Nvidia).
I know rob used to work with them, to some extent, when he was at ti so maybe he is able to say something without violating his NDA.

This is great news, though. Rob was saying how the new adrenos involved about a lot of register rearrangement so this is exactly what was needed. Hopefully these patches are just the beginning though I don't see what it would bring them. They need to get their android driver in better shape and I don't see how they can leverage drm/kms/gallium to that end given android provides none of those interfaces tmk.
Maybe android can eventually move to gallium/drm/kms

[robclark]

By the way Rob, does Red Hat allow you to hack on freedreno at work, or is this still a past time endeavor of yours?

basically yeah.. it's not all I do, ofc. I guess you can call it my "upstream-time" project

[grndzro]

Why is a 500ft tall demon stomping through downtown?