What's Holding Up The Free NVIDIA Tegra Driver

While NVIDIA has published open-source 2D driver code for their Tegra SoCs, there's DRM library code, and NVIDIA is working with a German company on an open-source driver, there's a small little hold-up in development.

For the past few days on the DRI mailing list, the open-source Tegra discussion hasn't been what to work on next or other open-source plays out of NVIDIA, but rather what to call the user-space driver. The 2D Tegra code for the DRM driver is being baked, there is the DRM library (libdrm) code available for communicating, but the user-space X.Org driver has yet to be started.

At first the hold-up was on deciding how to make the Tegra DDX driver -- whether to base it upon the xf86-video-modesetting driver, write it from scratch, or even use the deprecated xf86-video-nv driver as a base for this simple 2D Tegra X.Org driver.

The discussion for the past few days though has just been what to call the driver. Among the name proposals so far have been:

- xf86-video-tegra-kms
- xf86-video-opentegra
- xf86-video-grate
- xf86-video-tegradrm

Developers don't want to call this new driver "xf86-video-tegra", since the closed-source NVIDIA Tegra graphics driver already ships a tegra_drv.so DDX binary and having an open-source driver of the same name would then clash with this file.

Lucas Stach of the Nouveau project wrote on the mailing list this weekend, "Now that we've heard some candidates for the naming, can we please come to any conclusion? I would like to start extending the DDX in the next days and it would be really nice to have the naming thing out of the way for this."