Arm Mali "Valhall" Reverse-Engineering Started

[libv]

I'm very disappointed that arm is not providing the developers/collabora with documentation and suitable test boards. I think this will be seen as a mistake on the part of arm management in the future.

ARM has been making this mistake this for a whole decade. They shot down the first proposal for lima a decade ago.

[Tomin]

SteamPunker

Agree, very impressing.
I'm also curious as to why Colabora,
a for-profit company, are able to put all these resources into reverse-engineering this and constantly improving the Mesa driver for the ARM GPU family?
Could it be Google that is sponsoring this work behind the scenes? Do they secretly plan to replace the binary blob driver for this GPU on Android with an open source one or what is going on? Or perhaps a future ChromeOS device having an ARM GPU. It's puzzling to say the least.

I think the blog post is an advertisement for the work that Collabora does. Doing a little bit of work to write about and get word around that "btw, we do this sort of thing and we are good at it. Would you be interested in buying some of that?" They even ask interested people (projects) to contact at the end.

It could be of course that someone has already paid for this. Even then surely some more money wouldn't hurt.

[tomas]

Tomin

Yes, you may be right.
Nevertheless, it's clear that we are now witnessing a larger trend where ARM GPUs are finally getting proper open source drivers. In the case of ARM it's still an "unofficial" reverse-engineering effort not involving ARM (or at least not officially). But when it comes to Broadcom (V3DV) and Qualcomm (Turnip Vulkan driver), those are officially developed by the respective company if I'm not mistaken.

Maybe it's too much to hope for but I don't think it's unreasonable that we will see future Android phones without binary blob driver for the GPU.
Well, one can dream... 😊

[daniels]

I think the blog post is an advertisement for the work that Collabora does. Doing a little bit of work to write about and get word around that "btw, we do this sort of thing and we are good at it. Would you be interested in buying some of that?" They even ask interested people (projects) to contact at the end.

It could be of course that someone has already paid for this.

No, it hasn't been paid for by anyone except us. The rest of your post is pretty accurate, apart from the characterisation of it being 'a little bit' of work ...

[Tomin]

No, it hasn't been paid for by anyone except us. The rest of your post is pretty accurate, apart from the characterisation of it being 'a little bit' of work ...

Cool. And sorry, I didn't really mean to undervalue your or anyone's work. That was a poor choice of words. What I meant is that it was probably small amount of work compared to what there would be to sell if someone was willing to buy it. Surely this is very cool and important work that you are doing.

[daniels]

No offence taken at all, and as you can see from the commit logs it's not my work anyway.

[StarterX4]

Don't worry, Samsung is going to abandon these crappy Arm's GPUs starting with Exynos 2200 shipping with AMD GPU.

[libv]

No, it hasn't been paid for by anyone except us. The rest of your post is pretty accurate, apart from the characterisation of it being 'a little bit' of work ...

So what stopped collabora from supporting ARM GPU work before?

[jaxa]

RK3588 should have Valhall. If it ever gets released.

[SteamPunker]

-- the guy who started all this and got to enjoy unemployment because of it.

I'm sorry to read that, man. I hope you've found a better and more appreciative employer by now. It would certainly seem like your expertise would be in high demand in this industry right now. Anyway, thanks for your efforts to push for open source drivers!