Freedreno Graphics Driver Reaches Version 1.0

[robclark]

robclark: Question, if you have time.

I see that you've been working with the Adreno 320 quite a bit. Have you looked into the changes/differences for the 330? I'm hoping that it's minimal, but I guess knowing how some mobile stuff works, it could be an entirely different chip to program for.

As far as I can tell (from spoofing gpu-id and collecting cmdstream dumps from blob driver), it appears that it is pretty much the same from userspace perspective for all the a3xx. But currently in gallium I explicitly whitelist gpu's that are known to work (so a 'case 330:' would have to be added to a switch statement). There are a few small things to add in the kernel, but it looks fairly straightforward.

I recently received an 8074 dragonboard (snapdragon-800).. haven't really had much time for it yet, still finishing a few other things on the backlog. But hopefully in the next week or so I should start playing with a330.

[shmerl]

I really rather doubt that the jolla guys are interested in free drivers at all. I do not think anyone of the free driver guys have been contacted by anyone from jolla, but i would really like to be proven wrong. Jolla seem to be very happy with using libhybris and i doubt that they have other plans beyond keeping their binary driver compatibility mess working, somehow.

From their own words - they are interested. libhybris was used for a simple reason - free drivers are not yet read for production here and now (see above about optimizations). They might get ready soon, and may be it makes sense for Jolla to participate in their development. Feel free to ask them directly (I spoke with them). However now they are razor focused on releasing their first product and their resources are limited (they are pretty small startup, not some monster company like Nokia was), so take that into account.

[shmerl]

There can be also legal issues. What about patents and risks of being attacked by Qualcomm? Qualcomm are jerks, they already attacked Opus codec in the past for example, for no valid reason.

[libv]

From their own words - they are interested. libhybris was used for a simple reason - free drivers are not yet read for production here and now (see above about optimizations). They might get ready soon, and may be it makes sense for Jolla to participate in their development. Feel free to ask them directly (I spoke with them). However now they are razor focused on releasing their first product and their resources are limited (they are pretty small startup, not some monster company like Nokia was), so take that into account.

In case you missed something, I am rather aware of the status of the free drivers.

The initial investment in getting android drivers to run on other OSes is much less than the work needed to make proper free drivers, and I am sure that the libhybris using parties somehow hope that the hw vendors will provide platform specific binaries soon. This is the plan that those three parties are working from. And none of them have so far bothered with even talking to any of the free driver developers, and they never will. Unless they are handed the free drivers on a great big platter, with sugar on top, they will not bother with free drivers.

The real shame of libhybris is its message: those three parties have just said to HW vendors: you do not have to bother with specific drivers for specific platforms, we are all happy with using android drivers. Well done, now they get to maintain binary compatibility with each and ever android version forever, and we free graphics driver devs have to continue struggling on our own, even though we are the only hope there is.

[shmerl]

The real shame of libhybris is its message: those three parties have just said to HW vendors: you do not have to bother with specific drivers for specific platforms, we are all happy with using android drivers.

No, HW vendors don't care about these messages until you have volume. They simply tell you to get lost. In order to get volume, you need to get working drivers. So it's a catch 22 situation. You can complain as much as you want, those vendors don't care. Libhybris authors said they didn't abandon the native drivers fight. But until volume of glibc based systems will become significant, pressuring any manufacturers about it will result in nothing. Free drivers are the best bet as a way to bypass this inertia, but it won't take short time for them to be ready.

[Awesomeness]

The initial investment in getting android drivers to run on other OSes is much less than the work needed to make proper free drivers, and I am sure that the libhybris using parties somehow hope that the hw vendors will provide platform specific binaries soon. This is the plan that those three parties are working from. And none of them have so far bothered with even talking to any of the free driver developers, and they never will. Unless they are handed the free drivers on a great big platter, with sugar on top, they will not bother with free drivers.

The real shame of libhybris is its message: those three parties have just said to HW vendors: you do not have to bother with specific drivers for specific platforms, we are all happy with using android drivers. Well done, now they get to maintain binary compatibility with each and ever android version forever, and we free graphics driver devs have to continue struggling on our own, even though we are the only hope there is.

libhybris was initially not written by/for hardware vendors to get Android drivers working on their own devices, libhybris started as a community project by Mer and Open webOS developers to get these operating systems running on existing Android hardware (eg. install Open webOS on a GalaxyTab). That's a difference. Carsten Munk just happened to be hired by Jolla later.

[shmerl]

It made sense for Jolla to hire the Mer Architect. Many projects tried to get high quality working native drivers, but everyone figured - there is no fast way to do it.