Broadcom's VC4/V3D Driver Developer Parts Ways To Join Google

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Broadcom's VC4/V3D Driver Developer Parts Ways To Join Google

Eric Anholt who has near single-handedly been developing the V3D driver stack (formerly known as "VC5") for use by the Raspberry Pi 4 and other newer Broadcom boards as well as maintaining the mature VC4 driver stack he developed for previous Raspberry Pi boards has left Broadcom. But Broadcom's loss is to Google's open-source gain...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Broadcom-VC4-V3D-Developer-Left

[schmidtbag]

That's a shame and kinda scary for Linux Broadcom users, but, I do think it's great he's working on Freedreno, which definitely needs more help of someone with his level of experience.

[kmare]

That's a shame and kinda scary for Linux Broadcom users, but, I do think it's great he's working Freedreno, which definitely more help of someone with his level of experience.

It is a shame seeing him departing but at least it seems like the driver will continue strong based on what he said in his post:

The folks at Igalia are taking over from me on V3D (I’ve already done a bunch of review of perf improvement and bugfix patches they’ve made), and Bootlin is going to be continuing to work on getting open source display to parity with the closed source stack.

[andreano]

he's working on Freedreno

I think you mean Rob Clark there. I had to look in the commit log, because it could be, but I didn't see Eric there.

[abott]

Blows my mind how any chip maker can make money offering only a shitty proprietary blob.

This should have 3-5 broadcom engineers working on it non-stop.

[schmidtbag]

I think you mean Rob Clark there. I had to look in the commit log, because it could be, but I didn't see Eric there.

Huh? Did you not read the article?

[LoveRPi]

Blows my mind how any chip maker can make money offering only a shitty proprietary blob.

This should have 3-5 broadcom engineers working on it non-stop.

They have no market to support the expense. Amlogic won the OTT/Google AndroidTV market and Broadcom can only get scraps.

[abott]

They have no market to support the expense. Amlogic won the OTT/Google AndroidTV market and Broadcom can only get scraps.

Exactly my point. Maybe would have been able to sell chips if their drivers weren't shit. Most brands need to look at themselves and ask what they get from keeping everything proprietary. Nothing.

[Danielsan]

One man for one driver... There are a bunch graphic chips out there It means you need just fifty engineers to cover up all the entire graphic drivers productions...

[abott]

One man for one driver... There are a bunch graphic chips out there It means you need just fifty engineers to cover up all the entire graphic drivers productions...

So should AMD fire driver devs? Your point is illogical that just because some drivers exist they need more engineers, that's not the point as realistically there's only 4-5 3D drivers that actually exist and are used and still engineered today.

The Mali blob was 4x slower than Alyssa's RE'd driver as of the end of last year with glgears. If the Broadcom would have had drivers as good earlier, would it not have been chosen over the crappy Mali driver? Probably.