The Open-Source Vivante DRM Driver Has A Promising Future

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Open-Source Vivante DRM Driver Has A Promising Future

With the upcoming Linux 4.5 kernel, one of the new hardware drivers is the long-in-development Etnaviv DRM driver for providing reverse-engineered, open-source support to Vivante GPUs found in use by multiple SoC vendors...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Etnaviv-DRM-2016-Update

[rabcor]

An interesting project... I hope it ends well.

[Lynxeye]

The article makes it sound like I'm the one doing most of the work on Etnaviv, which isn't exactly true. While I'm an active community member by maintaining the kernel driver and regularly trying to get some information out on various FOSS conferences, there is a whole community of people working on Etnaviv, a fact I mentioned pretty prominently in my talk.

So the slides are not about I have or want to do, but about what the Etnaviv community as a whole has achieved. Michael, I would be glad if you could correct that in the article.

[Chewi]

Yeah, I was going to say that myself. Not to diminish Lucas' effort but Russell King, Christian Gmeiner and Jon Nettleton definitely deserve a mention.

I'm looking forward to trying this with Kodi, possibly under Wayland, or maybe the framebuffer. Jon has told me that the existing Kodi IMX VPU backend won't work with it in its current form though, which is disappointing. Software decoding will have to suffice for now.

[Adarion]

Thanks to the dev team, any effort and progress on the front of GPUs usually combined with ARM CPUs is welcome.

[Tomin]

It's interesting that official kernel driver is almost 10 times the size of this free driver. Do you have less code in kernel driver or what is the difference?