ARM Talks Mali Vulkan, Lack Of Open Drivers & More @ Linaro Budapest 17

[FishB8]

Of course there is no demand for OSS Mali drivers. Everytime one of these new SOC ARM solutions is introduced as the next RaspberryPi killer, I go look at the hardware spec. Sure enough, it always has a Mali graphics chip, and the product immediately goes onto my do-not-buy list. I'm not going to waste my time with a binary driver when I'm building my own kernels. It's not worth the headache.

[blubbaer]

Do I understand it correctly that the kernel drivers are all open source because of GPL but not mainlined because there is no open source userspace driver and they don't care about mainlining it. The userspace driver from ARM is closed source because some high-paid staff do the wrong decisions. So the community could reuse the kernel driver and write an userspace driver through reverse engineering with strace.

[d2kx]

Basically the whole video is just them grilling ARM about the driver situation, it is definitely worth a watch to understand all of the problems they face.

[pal666]

they gave bullshit excuse for closed source userspace driver: they are "afraid of patent trolls". somehow amd isn't afraid, intel isn't afraid, broadcom isn't afraid, even arm isn't afraid of patent trolls when writing opensource kernel driver, but with userspace driver they imagine some magic arm-only userspace-only patent trolls.
really people should avoid mali to teach those bastards some clue

[willmore]

I hope a lot of hard questions were asked and ARMs feet were held to the fire. This part of ARM support isn't something the community really should have to support. ARM has all the data. Either they need to supply that to the users or they need to develop the drivers OSS by themselves. The best solution would be a little of both. Work *with* the community*.

Also, they need to rethink how they deal with their licencees. Many of them who want to help the community say they can't because they feel prohibited from doing so because of the way their deal with ARM is written. That's also on ARM.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: ARM Talks Mali Vulkan, Lack Of Open Drivers & More @ Linaro Budapest 17

Linaro Connect 17 was this past week in Budapest. One of the interesting sessions was with regard to ARM's Mali graphics drivers where Vulkan was talked about as well as the lack of current open-source drivers due to lack of customer demand...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ARM-Mali-Drivers-BUD17