Purism Begins Making Their Own Wayland Compositor For The Librem 5 Smartphone

[k1l_]

Haha, they first got the GNOME fans to pay, then the KDE fans. And now they say they work on an own GUI.

I wonder if they ship at all.

[Guest]

Falcon1 - right, but the driver doesn't seem to be as far along as say Nouveau, AMD or Intel GPU drivers.

AFAIK, the open source GPU drivers for these phone GPUs are still very incomplete and don't perform well.

In order to provide a decent experience, you need solid stable drivers with good performance. Nouveau is also a reverse engineered driver, but with lots of caveats, and isn't stable on some hardware - given that drivers for these phone GPUs are also reverse engineered, we can expect that they will be in the same situation.

Compared to that, Intel GPU driver works really well (~98% of the time). Intel also provides really good documentation for that GPU hardware.

In order for this project to succeed, they need a high quality open source GPU driver that is reliable and performant.

[Falcon1]

Falcon1 - right, but the driver doesn't seem to be as far along as say Nouveau, AMD or Intel GPU drivers.

AFAIK, the open source GPU drivers for these phone GPUs are still very incomplete and don't perform well.

In order to provide a decent experience, you need solid stable drivers with good performance. Nouveau is also a reverse engineered driver, but with lots of caveats, and isn't stable on some hardware - given that drivers for these phone GPUs are also reverse engineered, we can expect that they will be in the same situation.

Compared to that, Intel GPU driver works really well (~98% of the time). Intel also provides really good documentation for that GPU hardware.

In order for this project to succeed, they need a high quality open source GPU driver that is reliable and performant.

Quality is not a fixed target. It depends on the needs and requirements. It might be good enough for the Phone to start with and bug fix what's found in testing and development.

Quality is also measured on different parts. Functionalty, the code (readbility, standards, idioms, structure), etc.

The code quality of etnaviv is on par with the rest of the kernel. Otherwise it would be included.

Intel has to support every support chipset. Same goes for Nouveau and NVidia. The Etnatviv driver might be, or able to. meet the quality criteria for the phone.

I bet that the code quality of the closed source drivers is not meeting Linux kernel standards.

Just that a big company is backing the driver does not mean It's going to "high quality". Intel and NVidia drivers are know to break use cases here and there.

So I don't know if Etnaviv meets, or is able to meet the quality criteria for the librem phone. It might it might not. But there is always the Vivante closed source driver.

Depending on the "support" contract with NXP they might eb able reduce the support fee to NXP forgoing support on the Vivante BLOB driver and reserve that money for support on the etnaviv driver. Or the other way around.

That's a business decision. Off course I hope they choose etnaviv because that means more freedom for the user and longer use of the phone.

Anyway more info on Etnaviv for iMX8:

https://www.pengutronix.de/en/2018-02-23-embedded-world-2018.html

[Azrael5]

Probably never...

Thanks for the answer it is an amazing news.