Why Canonical Is Using Android Drivers For Ubuntu Mir

[syrjala]

The system had access to 3D drivers, but nothing (stock) really used them: No compositing or hardware-based rendering. It was also very difficult to find applications to use them. So yes, a driver to develop against did exist, but there was exceedingly little development against it.

That's incorrect. hildon-desktop (the window manager/compositor) used the GPU.

It's true that most apps didn't make use of the GPU, mainly because the toolkit of choice was gtk+ which was not a good match for GPUs. There was also a serious lack of time/resources to fix the buggy drivers.

AFAIK that's pretty much similar to how Android did things before the 4.x releases, ie. most apps are sw rendered, and the GPU is only used for compositing and 3D games.

[snadrus]

Maemo, not the kernel

The system had access to 3D drivers, but nothing (stock) really used them: No compositing or hardware-based rendering. It was also very difficult to find applications to use them. So yes, a driver to develop against did exist, but there was exceedingly little development against it.

[libv]

Maemo on N900 refused 3D drivers b/c of the closed-source reason. Ubuntu made it big with great 3D on closed drivers before they became open, so I'd think the same will happen in mobile.
Since Mir (as opposed to SurfaceFlinger) provides C/C++ bindings to these 3D drivers, we can finally get the most out of ARM hardware.

Erm... Really? No pvr binaries on N900? That's news to me, and i guess to a lot of people. Makes me wonder what Oliver McFadden ported q3a to gles for then. Feel free to back that claim up, right now.

[snadrus]

Maemo on N900 refused 3D drivers b/c of the closed-source reason. Ubuntu made it big with great 3D on closed drivers before they became open, so I'd think the same will happen in mobile.
Since Mir (as opposed to SurfaceFlinger) provides C/C++ bindings to these 3D drivers, we can finally get the most out of ARM hardware.

[Qaz`]

Seem reasonable to me. I guess quite a lot of ubuntu phone early users will be enthusiast that flash it on a android phone (even after the first actual ubuntu phones come out), and what easier way to support more phones than being able to use their android drivers.

I will at least keep an eye on ubuntu phone and sailfish, I want something more like maemo (that is, something a little bit more in line with linux desktops). I think there very well might be a small market made up by tech enthusiast for one of these, at least as 3d party roms for other androids.

[TheOne]

...
can we really use all the same software, even with XWayland/XMir? If so, count me in for a future in ARM.

I guess we will have to wait to see if Canonical's offerings triumph or become a major league disaster. I guess that part of success will be if open source developers update the source of many critical applications to use newer technologies Wayland/Mir replacing X.

On the raspberry pi side, xbmc was ported to work with GL ES as Open Arena, it all depends on developers motivation to do it.

[curaga]

On the other hand, I get the feeling that running all of the same software on an Android GPU would give you some issues. Would Blender 'just work', for instance?

Likely not. Many mobile GPUs only support GL ES, and even those that would support real/desktop GL, the Android drivers are ES only.

That is, unless Blender has a GL ES port.

[scionicspectre]

If I'm correct, Mir would use the same approach as Wayland to get up and running on Android drivers through libhybris. Maybe that's an oversimplification, but for people who think this is somehow Mir's secret weapon, there's nothing to keep Wayland from the same approach. So we don't need Mir to run the traditional Linux stack (GTK & Qt in particular) on the broad range of mobile devices.

On the other hand, I get the feeling that running all of the same software on an Android GPU would give you some issues. Would Blender 'just work', for instance? Consider how Intel's GPU drivers on Mesa used to have issues and still do with some advanced features, like acceleration in VMWare and VirtualBox (probably not necessarily Intel's fault). Still, you see where I'm going with this- can we really use all the same software, even with XWayland/XMir? If so, count me in for a future in ARM.

[TheOne]

raspberry pi does not have mali. It has a BCM2835 broadcom videocore. And yes, it does work with accelerated UI, using evil "driver is entirely hidden in firmware" approach.

And BTW: odroid u2 is on a totally different playing field from raspberry pi. Raspberry pi has a crappy single core 700. odroid u2 has a quad-core cortex A9, with a, yes, this one actually does have a Mali.

Ahh, thanks for clearing that out don't know where the heck I read it was a mali 400 it seems it happened to me the same as this guy: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/vi...hp?f=24&t=7485

I'm looking forward for a future of energy efficiency computers and it seems ARM has the lead for now. Want to buy an odroid u2 but with all this stupid war threats and stuff is kind of risky to order one since it is manufactured on south Korea.

[blackiwid]

Obviously if even Google couldn't force hardware vendors to provide open drivers,

Could you please share the link to the source of that claim? I dont think they at least care even a bit about opensource drivers. If not the oposite.



To the news, I found the title funny, because I did ask myself never that question, but I did not read here anything about that Mir will be compatible or uses android driver architecture.

So I would have liked as title more something like: "Canonicals Mir is using Android drivers" or somethign like that.
I need no Canonical dev say some marketing blabla about it, to know why they want that.
If you as company care 0 about free software, free drivers and so on, of course you would like to be able to use all the arm non-free drivers.

If you have not to sell your "product" because of openess or freeness, you just can switch from closedsource support drivers (too) into closedsource drivers only from now on, a complete closed plattform.
From now on I think I call Ubuntu not anymore (GNU)Ubuntu/Linux, but Ubuntu/Android so Ubuntu is now a Android distribution, basicly.

And they should not say some stupid about the architecture, its because they can use the closed source drivers, thats the reason the only reason for that move.

So I am to lazy to scandalize that, I will make my desition based on that desitions and maybe some are able to guess what that is.